Shakespeare maintained a wide-ranging interest in different forms of “natural philosophy,” which combined what we now call ...

The second half of the 19th century was a particularly interesting time to imagine Mars. This was a period during which the ...

Thinking about a problem purely mathematically, for instance, has pitfalls if the equations rely on bad assumptions. Drawing ...

In this video, I discuss some of my favorite science fiction novels with philosophical themes. Featured titles include: - ...

Adam Roberts, a professor at the University of London and author of The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), proposes that this is just what makes Somnium “the first proper ...

This is, of course, not true. Science fiction can present new artistic possibilities for the reader, exposing our imagination and thinking to new worlds and ideas that may seem unimaginable. As ...

When you walk into Holly Andersen’s office, the first thing you’ll notice is the most colorful bookshelf you’ve ever seen in a philosophy department. Her personal library is stacked with books that ...

Great science fiction often deals with geopolitical issues, broad social pendulum shifts, and large-scale systems failure (think Dune, or Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation trilogy, which I inhaled ...

It seems they don’t want rogue artificial superintelligences waging war on humanity, as in James Cameron’s 1984 science fiction thriller, The Terminator (ominously, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ...

Today, we call those dreams science fiction. Science fiction’s earliest inklings began in the mid-1600s, when Johannes Kepler and Francis Godwin wrote pioneering stories about voyages to the moon.