By Jeremy Clift , author of Born in Space: Unlocking Destiny Simmons' best-known work. In the history of science fiction, a handful of novels have changed the trajectory of the genre, expanding its ambitions, reshaping its narrative possibilities, and introducing images that linger in the collective imagination for decades. Frank Herbert’s Dune  did it in the 1960s. William Gibson’s Neuromancer  did it in the 1980s. And in 1989, Dan Simmons accomplished something similar with Hyperion . The...

By Jeremy Clift , author of Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse The Wrath of Khan features a strong plot, increased tension, and a sharp supporting performance from Ricardo Montalban. What could a seventeenth-century Puritan epic possibly have in common with a twentieth-century science-fiction film? More than most classrooms acknowledge. At first glance, Paradise Lost by John Milton and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan seem worlds apart. One is a dense theological poem in blank verse, composed in...

By Jeremy Clift , author of Space Vault: The Seed Eclipse In futures where bodies, timelines, and even identities are engineered, love becomes the one variable that refuses optimization. Science fiction is full of systems designed to improve humanity: longer lives, cleaner genetics, curated memories, digital societies. Again and again, those systems assume that what makes us human can be modeled, regulated, or replaced. And again and again, they are undone by something far older and far less...