fiction

Social robot roommate Jibo initially caused a stir, but sadly didn't live long. Photograph: JiboNot that there haven’t been an array of other attempts. Jibo, a social robot roommate that used AI and endearing gestures to bond with its…

Several people are typing, and they’re all saying Netflix’s Leave the World Behind is wildly prescient. The movie, directed by Sam Esmail, opens on a world where communication has been knocked out following a cyberattack. And earlier this…

Chest-bursting aliens. Time-traveling DeLoreans. Dystopian futures. Galaxies far, far away. Science fiction is full of characters, set pieces, and scenarios that few other genres could ever get away with. Due to its often speculative…

Carol Pinchefsky has written almost 2,000 articles about geek culture for outlets such as Forbes.com, Playboy.com, and Syfy.com. Over the past 20 years, she’s watched fantasy and science fiction grow from a niche interest to a massive…

Fanbinding has exploded in popularity in the past few years. Many fanbinders do adhere to a strict gift-economy stance in line with the writers whose work they’re binding, often limiting the money they collect, if any, to covering material…

The problem with testing AI chatbot subscriptions like Google’s Gemini Advanced and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus is their generality. The same tool is used for disparate applications; the same software service that developers in San Francisco are…

The science fiction series For All Mankind, which recently wrapped up its fourth season on Apple TV+, explores an alternate timeline in which the United States and the Soviet Union establish a Mars colony in the 1990s. Science fiction…

No matter which movie snatches Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, “Barbenheimer” will still go down as the winner. Last summer’s box office face-off between Christopher Nolan’s historical drama about a troubled male genius and the atomic…

Public perception of psychological operations soured in a big way in the mid-1970s, when details of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program were first released, detailing a plot—more based in science fiction than science—to brainwash subjects using…

Children of Dune, the third book in author Frank Herbert’s Dune series, explores the lives of Leto and Ghanima Atreides, the twin children of Paul Atreides, the hero of the first novel. TV writer Andrea Kail was impressed by the book’s…