James Graham Ballard was an English novelist and short story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media. Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962), but later courted political controversy with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes the story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968) and the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.
Robert Anson Heinlein was an American science fiction author, aeronautical engineer, and naval officer. Sometimes called the "dean of science fiction writers", he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction. His published works, both fiction and non-fiction, express admiration for competence and emphasize the value of critical thinking. His plots often posed provocative situations which challenged conventional social mores. His work continues to have an influence on the science-fiction genre, and on modern culture more generally.
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction, which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction can trace its roots to ancient mythology. It is related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction and contains many subgenres. Its exact definition has long been disputed among authors, critics, scholars, and readers.
Robert Silverberg is an American author and editor, best known for writing science fiction. He is a multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, and a Grand Master of SF. He has attended every Hugo Award ceremony since the inaugural event in 1953.
Ian McDonald is a British science fiction novelist, living in Belfast. His themes include nanotechnology, postcyberpunk settings, and the impact of rapid social and technological change on non-Western societies.
The Rhysling Awards are an annual award given for the best science fiction, fantasy, or horror poem of the year. The award name was dubbed by Andrew Joron in reference to a character in a science fiction story: the blind poet Rhysling, in Robert A. Heinlein's short story "The Green Hills of Earth". The award is given in two categories: "Best Long Poem", for works of 50 or more lines, and "Best Short Poem", for works of 49 or fewer lines.
Time travel is a common theme in fiction, mainly since the late 19th century, and has been depicted in a variety of media, such as literature, television, film, and advertisements.
Fictional depictions of Mercury, the innermost planet of the Solar System, have gone through three distinct phases. Before much was known about the planet, it received scant attention. Later, when it was incorrectly believed that it was tidally locked with the Sun creating a permanent dayside and nightside, stories mainly focused on the conditions of the two sides and the narrow region of permanent twilight between. Since that misconception was dispelled in 1965, the planet has again received less attention from fiction writers, and stories have largely concentrated on the harsh environmental conditions that come from the planet's proximity to the Sun.
The 4-Dimensional Nightmare, also known as Voices of Time, is a collection of science fiction short stories by British writer J. G. Ballard, published in 1963 by Victor Gollancz.
Black holes, objects whose gravity is so strong that nothing including light can escape them, have been depicted in fiction since before the term was coined by John Archibald Wheeler in the late 1960s. Black holes have been depicted with varying degrees of accuracy to the scientific understanding of them. Because what lies beyond the event horizon is unknown and by definition unobservable from outside, authors have been free to employ artistic license when depicting the interiors of black holes.
Supernovae have been featured in works of fiction. While a nova is strictly speaking a different type of astronomical event, science fiction writers often use the terms interchangeably and refer to stars "going nova" without further clarification; this can at least partially be explained by the earliest science fiction works featuring these phenomena predating the introduction of the term "supernova" as a separate class of event in 1934. Since these stellar explosions release enormous amounts of energy, some stories propose using them as a power source for extremely energy-intense processes, such as time travel in the Doctor Who serial The Three Doctors from 1972. For the same reason, inducing them is occasionally portrayed as a potential weapon, for instance in the 1966 novel The Solarians by Norman Spinrad.
"The Concentration City" is a dystopian short story by British author J. G. Ballard, first published, under the title "Build-Up", in New Worlds volume 19 number 55 in January 1957. It was reprinted in the collections Billennium and Chronopolis and later, under its revised title, in The Disaster Area and was also included in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 and The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard.
Tor.com is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine published by Tor Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. The magazine publishes articles, reviews, original short fiction, re-reads and commentary on speculative fiction.
Chronopolis is a 1982 experimental stop motion science fiction film directed by Polish animator Piotr Kamler, with music composed by renowned composer Luc Ferrari, and, originally, narration by Michael Lonsdale. It was Kamler's first and only full-length film. The film won "Best Children's Film" at Fantafestival in 1982 and "Critics' Award - Special Mention" at Fantasporto, and it was shown out of competition alongside Patrick Bokanowski's L'ange at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.
Billenium is a short story by British author J. G. Ballard, first published in the November 1961 issue of New Worlds and in the 1962 collection Billennium. It later appeared in The Terminal Beach (1964), Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971), and The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006). With a dystopian ambience, "Billennium" explores themes similar to Ballard's earlier story "The Concentration City", of space shortages and over-crowding.
Ken Liu is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his short fiction, which has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and multiple "Year's Best" anthologies.
Collision Course is the fourth novel by the science fiction author Barrington J. Bayley. The novel was inspired by the multiple time dimensions proposed by J. W. Dunne. The plot centers on the collision of two alternate "presents", with disastrous implications for reality.
The Fall of Chronopolis (ISBN 0-87997-043-X) is the fifth novel by the science fiction author Barrington J. Bayley. It details the eternal conflict through time between the Chronostatic Empire and its enemy, the Hegemony.
Amal El-Mohtar is a Canadian poet and writer of speculative fiction. She has published short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, and has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly magazine Goblin Fruit since 2006.
Sarah Pinsker is an American science fiction and fantasy author. She is a nine-time finalist for the Nebula Award, and her debut novel A Song for a New Day won the 2019 Nebula for Best Novel while her story Our Lady of the Open Road won 2016 award for Best Novelette. Her novelette "Two Truths and a Lie" received both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award. Her fiction has also won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Tiptree Awards.
