Sci-fi

Expectations for the new Dune movie from director Denis Villeneuve are sky-high after the release of a promising first trailer earlier this month. But anyone who's seen the David Lynch version from 1984 knows that Dune is a hard book to adapt. Science fiction author Rajan Khanna notes that the Lynch film struggles to balance storytelling with exposition.

In 1909, long before the invention of the World Wide Web or the prospect of a world where we must live socially distant from each other, the English writer E.M. Forster arguably predicted both.  Read more

You can't have a good thriller without a nasty and formidable opponent for your hero. But it isn't enough to just write a character and call him "the bad guy." Just as it's important to create a well-rounded, three-dimensional hero, you must create a villain who is well-developed and not just your standard killer, robber, or kidnapper.  Read more

Genre is a funny thing.

I've been a science fiction and fantasy nerd for as long as I can remember. And I'm not sure when I started to register that some of the speculative books I love weren't all marketed or categorized the same way.

What makes 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale more literature than science fiction?  Read more

We're closing the doors on 2019 and with that, I've finally finished up this essay, which I've been working on for over a year and which keeps having to be updated as new scuffles arose.  Read more