Red Rising Book Cover with angry clouds in background

Book Review: Red Rising

Red Rising, by Pierce Brown, takes place in a dystopian version of our galaxy, where a dying Earth sent pioneers to terraform the other planets in the solar system and altered their genetics to ensure their success, using hair and eye color to differentiate between the different levels of hierarchy. …

Read more

Book Review: Riot Baby

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi is one of the more creative and insightful works of science fiction I have read in years. Rarely has an author so successfully weaved the painful racial history of African Americans in the United States with the science fiction mainstay of superhuman abilities. Supernatural Powers …

Read more

Fantasy Reconsidered

I used to believe I didn’t like fantasy fiction. I’d mentally scoff at the concept, believing it was comprised of writing based on fairy tales, or concepts so unrelated to real life no rational adult or serious writer could possibly want to indulge in it. As has so often occurred …

Read more

A Biased History of Sci-Fi

I love science fiction, but I’m a terrible fan of it. I love spaceships and technology and new ideas and robots and aliens, but I could not save a conversation by talking with any kind of fluency about representations in books about any of them. I’ve always been better at …

Read more

Paul Martz Named 2022 Roswell Award Finalist

Paul Martz is administering self-defibrillation after finding out that his story, Dr. Harriet Hartfeld’s Home for Aging AIs, is a finalist for the 2022 Omega Sci-Fi Roswell Award. Prizewinners will be announced during the May 21 awards ceremony, in which finalist stories will be read aloud by celebrity narrators. Attend …

Read more

Matthew Cushing Named 2021 Roswell Award Finalist

Spec Fic Writers author Matthew Cushing’s short story “The Rite to Vote” was selected as a Finalist for the 2021 Roswell Award. Presented by The Lightbringer Project and the Omega Sci-Fi Awards, the Roswell Award is an international short science fiction story competition that provides an opportunity for science fiction …

Read more

Expert Advice from a New Writer

Writing advice surrounds me. Everyone, it seems, is an expert. One day, all that information on self-publishing, pitching a story, and writing query letters will come in handy, but for now I feel like I’m drowning in unhelpful advice. Sink with me to the bottom of the writing-advice ocean, where …

Read more