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1 week ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll |Eugene Byrne |Kim Newman
Dissatisfaction with the state of the world is common. Far rarer are the drive and ability to do something about it. That’s why energetic visionaries, determined and able to reshape the world according to their desires, make fascinating figures around whom to build narratives. Here are five works that feature visionaries. A sultana finds herself strolling through city streets. To her discomfort, she is unveiled. However, no men use this as a pretext to pester her.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll
Everyone likes to cheer for the underdog, particularly in military conflicts. This presents a challenge for speculative fiction authors. On the one hand, writing about the little guy somehow overcoming tremendous odds is a crowd-pleaser. On the other hand, the underdog is an underdog for a reason. If overwhelming military force worked so well in places like Vietnam, Somalia, and Iraq, how could it fail in the author’s fictional universe? Here are five answers to that question.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll
Solving crimes can be straightforward. First, someone has to commit a crime, then someone else has to gather the clues, consider their implications, then reveal the identity of the culprit. Not every creator seems satisfied with this approach—a few have even provided their detectives with abilities beyond the human norm. Private detective Marty Hopkirk is observant enough to realize in the pilot episode that a woman’s seemingly natural death from heart failure was anything but natural.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | Alan Brown |James Davis Nicoll
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll
Can systems be worth defending or are only heroic individuals laudable? Tales of righteous underdogs and iconoclasts striving against bad or corrupt systems are legion, but what about stories that celebrate institutions and organizations that work for the common good? Is it possible to even envision an organization whose net effect is positive, a system to which one can feel a loyalty that is not a symptom of deep-seated derangement? Some SFF authors think so.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll
Sometimes a writer sets out with a clear thesis that the story is intended to support… and sometimes the reader sets down the resulting book (or, in the case of movies and TV, the viewer looks up from the screen) having come to entirely different conclusions. Let’s look at five examples…Faced with possibility of nuclear attack from those dastardly Reds, twin cities Green Prairie, Missouri, and River City, Kansas opt for very different strategies.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll
The science fiction convention for first contact between humans and aliens is a face-to-face meeting in meatspace. This has the advantage of immediacy: No speed-of-light time lags to contend with! In-person meetings do have the disadvantage of proximity, should it turn out that humans and aliens cannot (or choose not to) peacefully co-exist. Therefore, while distant detection does not offer immediate gratification, it is not nearly as dangerous as in-person first contact.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll
There are many SF novels about future Earths that are crowded dystopias. Some authors have dared to imagine future Earths that are no longer crowded. Let’s call this bucoliforming: the transformation of a once-crowded Earth back into thinly populated wilderness. Sometimes these futures are happy, sometimes sad. Sometimes depopulation is due to benign reasons (everyone up and left for new planets), sometimes due to catastrophe. Here is an assortment of stories about bucoliformed future Earths.
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1 month ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll |Ernest Callenbach
If there’s one aspect of the future about which we can be completely certain, it is that the United States will either grow larger, stay the same size, or shrink. SF authors looking for reason for the last possibility (shrinking) tend to imagine some institution-shattering large-scale calamity such as a meteor impact, a nuclear war, or pandemic—some disaster large enough to overwhelm civilian and military organizations.
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2 months ago | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll
The movie Tremors 2: Aftershocks features a memorable scene in which Burt Gummer (played by Michael Gross), having just discovered a heretofore unknown to Gummer fact about the life cycle of the animals he is trying to manage, indignantly complains “I feel I was denied… critical… NEED TO KNOW… INFORMATION.”We’ve all been there, although perhaps not in quite the same circumstances as poor Gummer. So have many protagonists.
