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Once or twice, if we’re lucky, we may come across a writer who changes our lives. For me, the greatest discovery of my reading life, and the biggest influence on my writing life, was a box of fantasy and science fiction books my father left behind when he moved out.
Some argue that Fearless Girl is not a “legitimate” work of art because its meaning is dependent on Charging Bull, but works of art often appropriate parts (or even all) of other works in order to synthesize new meaning.
Based on a Ray Bradbury short story, Elton John’s “Rocket Man” was released the same week as the Apollo 16 launch, and echoes of the story can still be found on the surface of the moon.
Last week, Elon Musk shared SpaceX’s vision to put humans on Mars and eventually start a colony. Colonizing Mars is an appealing idea, especially among those, such as Stephen Hawking, who believe our future as a species relies on our ability to become interplanetary. In science fiction, off-Earth colonies often have disheartening results.
In the dark, being told stories carries weight. There’s a power there, for some stories, that doesn’t seem to exist during the day. When I was a child, my family would take daytrips in the car and when we drove home it would be night. My mom would turn on various audiobooks of stories and…
While science fiction has long been obsessed with robots, the genre has an even longer relationship with aliens, who are often far scarier: where they came from, how they think, and what they want are questions to which there is no comforting answer, if there’s an answer at all.
A writer is first – perhaps foremost – a reader. Why, then, is it rare to find our characters reading? It’s not that we don’t find books given a special place in fiction. Writers love writing about books.
A collection of intricately linked yet inherently stand-alone stories, the central plotline of The Martian Chronicles follows the semi-allegorical colonization of Mars by the Americans, and documents the removal of the planet from the aboriginal Martians.
On Thursday, May 4, 1950, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is published. The twenty-six stories in the collection weave a narrative of nostalgia and doom that spreads across the rust-red Martian landscape, where cringing anxiety mixes with slack-jawed wonder.
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