The first time I saw a meteor, I’d slipped outside to lie in the grass after everyone else had gone to sleep. The daytime commotion of my cousins’ and siblings’ games and my…

In some ways, Richard Dawkins has been thinking about contingency for most of his life. The book that catapulted him to fame, The Selfish Gene, is about one kind of contingency, which…

I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September…

In Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling series Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy, an unknown force infiltrates a coastal village and begins to transform the nature of everything living…

I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September…

Great art often jumps ahead of its time, and science fiction is no exception. It has anticipated cellular phones and submarines, geostationary satellites and touch-screen electronics.…

Halfway through director Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Sandra Bullock suffers the most cosmic case of homesick blues since Keir Dullea was hurled toward the infinite in 2001: A Space…

“Literature is the opposite of data,” wrote novelist Stephen Marche in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books in October 2012. He cited his favorite line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:…