Here you will find all the non-fiction articles published by SPJ, including articles and reviews about works of science fiction, developments in science, and their philosophical implications.
Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga may be one of the most varied book series written to date. The first in the series, Ender’s Game, is a young-adult novel, while its sequel, Speaker of the Dead, explores a mixture of more adult-driven hard sci-fi and philosophical fiction. These two books are some of Card’s most praised… Keep Reading
“God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent — it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.” (Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love, New York: Ace Books,… Keep Reading
Many years ago, a friend of mine who knows about these sorts of things handed me a book and said “Here, you have to read this.” It was a copy of Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons. I glanced over the jacket copy. “What’s the Culture?” I asked. “Well,” she said, “it’s kind of hard… Keep Reading
Before the quantum revolution, the scientific depiction of the natural world was a deterministic one, i.e., once all the initial parameters of a physical system were known, the evolution of a system could be predicted with exact precision. It was this ability to make exact predictions derived from empirical knowledge that made up the backbone… Keep Reading
If I were to say to you that the extinction of feudalism led to the pandemic of the Bubonic Plague, you would tell me that I was wrong and that I had gotten my facts backward: the outbreak of the Plague led to the eventual extinction of feudalism and the invention of a middle class.… Keep Reading
Originally serialized in Astounding Magazine during the 1940s, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is one of his most widely known works. Yet, many of the people I’ve come across have never heard of Foundation. Instead, they are familiar with his robot stories. Perhaps the Keep Reading
As a Christian writer of SF and fantasy, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what makes most works of “Christian F and SF” so bad. It’s no news to anyone that most of what is called “Christian” art is very subpar by the standards of professional artists. Christian bands do not… Keep Reading
In my last article about the Doctor Who universe, I asked the question “What is the point of Time Travel in an Eternalist universe where nothing can be changed because everything has already happened?” I wanted to briefly discuss one possible answer. I mentioned in that article that the only way the Weeping Angels could… Keep Reading
I’ve been a follower of Christ and a science-fiction and fantasy writer for roughly the same amount of time, although I hope I’ve been a better Christian than I have been a writer (after all, I still haven’t sold a whole book!). Religion is one of the hardest things to portray when creating a science-fiction… Keep Reading
Like the films which are its inspiration, Alien and Philosophy: I Infest, Therefore I Am is not a book for the fainthearted. It may be Keep Reading
Released in 1979, Ridley Scott’s Alien combined H.R. Giger’s disturbing aesthetics with a tremendous cast, most of whom Keep Reading
One of the most iconic episodes in the recent Doctor Who reboot is season 3’s “Blink.” In this episode, the Doctor and his companion, Martha, are the supporting characters, trying to assist one-off character Sally Sparrow, even though they are trapped 38 years in Sally’s past. The complicating factor here is the Weeping Angels, a… Keep Reading
