By Jeremy Clift , author of Born in Space: Unlocking Destiny Artemis 2 lifts off (NASA) As we track NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon, the first high-resolution images of Earth from the Orion spacecraft are already reshaping how we see ourselves. The view of our planet suspended in darkness, its atmosphere glowing faintly at the edge, auroras shimmering at the poles, is at once familiar and disorienting, a reminder that Earth is no longer the fixed center of the frame, but an object seen...

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...