Posts

10 everyday words we got from science fiction writers

frp2

American sci-fi writer, Theodore Sturgeon famously said, “Sure, ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” He believed that was “because ninety percent of everything is crud”, but many literary purists think sci-fi’s exotic worlds, flamboyant characters and incredibly imaginative plots make it throwaway. Yet, if they delved a bit deeper, they’d find a profound genre that’s both rich in themes and perhaps, more surprisingly, in language too. In fact, over the years it’s given us a myriad of new words, the majority of which have been created in order to describe concepts and devices that didn’t have existing words in their time. Most of these words have never been incorporated into our everyday language. However, sometimes technology catches up to sci-fi and a fictional word gets borrowed and becomes a common term. In other situations, a sci-fi author doesn’t necessarily coin a word, but uses it and popularizes it, keeping it alive and in use.

So, ready yourself for blast off as we count down 10 of our favorite out-of-this-world words and phrases from science fiction that have become part of our everyday lives.

Read more

Femtastic Lit: History’s 10 greatest sci-fi novels written by women

bestfemalescifiwriters

Despite the fact that women have helped shape science fiction from the beginning, female-penned novels are often mysteriously absent from the “Best-of” lists. There are many people that believe that women don’t (or even worse, can’t) write science fiction–which simply isn’t true. With this list, we celebrate some of the most influential and noteworthy sci-fi novels written by women.
Read more

7 of movie history’s most iconic classic sci-fi posters

2001+A+Space+Odyssey+(1968)+3

Sci-fi is a graphic designer’s dream: lurid planetary colours! Monsters! Tentacles! Women screaming! The 1950s was the heyday. Not held back by political correctness, artists went wild with buxom women in waspishly waisted costumes and the graphic depictions of the things that made young kids reading comic books by torchlight afraid – those pesky aliens. But before all that was…
Read more