It’s 2012 and Australian web journalist Martin Seymour is posted to Iran to cover the elections. He’s soon caught up in massive protest…
In the recent film ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ the chimpanzee Caesar is the subject of a retrovirus experiment which enormously…
In October last year, NASA announced its ‘Hundred-Year Starship’ program designed to settle humans on other worlds, starting with Mars in the 2030s.…
In a previous article we discussed the use of relativistic kill weapons: impactors travelling at almost the speed of light delivering enormous amounts…
Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh runs the Internet Porn Squad, a policing backwater in near-future Edinburgh: but that’s about to change. Anwar Hussein, Scottish-Pakistani…
There was excitement at the European Physics Society conference in Grenoble, France last week as physicists gathered to review evidence for the detection…
Most authors deal in plots; China Miéville, by contrast, deals in settings. Perdido Street Station and the follow-up Bas-Lag novels gave us thaumaturgy…
In the latest edition of Scientific American (August, 2011), Professor George Ellis asks the question “Does the Multiverse Really Exist?” There are many…
If and when we encounter intelligent aliens, a new scientific discipline will spring into being: Exopsychology – the study of alien intelligence and personality.…
It’s not often that a new SF novel from a major talent has critics frothing at the mouth and posting one-star reviews on…
In 1957, at the height of the Cold War, statistician Jimmie Savage of the RAND institute was asked a scarily-intriguing question: ‘What is…
The current edition of The Economist (July 2nd, 2011) has a provocative cover story. With the retirement of the last space shuttle this…
This is an article in the continuing series on alien weapon systems. It’s a warm summer evening as Pete and Chloe walk hand…
In March 1955, Einstein wrote to the widow of his oldest friend, Michele Besso: “Now he has departed from this strange world a…
In Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, the Culture Minds are AIs possessing an intelligence far surpassing our own. Many people have speculated that…
