SF Essay 3 – text that’s not a text The Expanse S1E01: “Dulcinea” – first aired December 14, 2015 on Syfy, based on the novel Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey. The premise of The Expanse is this: motivated by the imminent collapse of Earth’s ecosystem, humans set out on extraterrestrial jaunts to [...]
PROPOSAL “Story of Your Life” is a novella by Ted Chiang that is framed as the story that narrator and protagonist Dr. Louise Banks tells her unborn daughter on the night of her daughter’s conception. Through a non-sequential series of memories spanning from the day aliens arrive on Earth to the day Louise’s daughter dies [...]
Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life,” an elegant experiment combining aliens, variational principles, and the linguistic relativity hypothesis, was first published in 1998, just as the western world was coming online and people were beginning to come in contact with each other in unprecedented ways. It was before the rise of now-ubiquitous and near-instantaneous [...]
I think what makes a story “science” fiction as opposed to the other kinds is that it includes something that doesn’t exist but could. As in, the idea invented by the author only has to be the tiniest bit plausible on the spectrum of things that we believe, to the best of our knowledge and [...]
