In the year 2057 — when getting a Ph.D. in history is a high-risk endeavor requiring mental and physical endurance, athleticism, a working knowledge of quantum mechanics and Victorian table manners,...
It is kind of fun to think about the world ending. “Survivor” is on its 20-something season (I can’t even count them any more); AMC’s original series “The Walking Dead” wowed audiences again...
Literally just minutes ago (as of this writing) I finished Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1912 novel "A Princess of Mars," and I'm fairly convinced that it's the best worst early-20th-century science fiction novel...
As a survivor of Catholic school – 13 years of it, no less – I recognized the Ash Wednesday crosses on the foreheads of students last week. Add to that the stream of Facebook statuses about what...
“There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.” That’s the motto Madeleine Hanna lives by, anyway, in the 1980s college world of Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot.”...
Everyone knows the story of Henry VIII and his parade of headless wives, but last weekend, I tried to inject some new life into the old tale by filming “Reformation! The Musical” for Campus MovieFest....
There’s nothing like child gladiators to up those network television ratings, am I right? That’s how it works in Panem, anyway – the totalitarian, post-nuclear holocaust North American government...
Book lovers would be hard-pressed to find anything more perennially popular with science fiction/fantasy authors than dystopian governments doing horrible things to young children. Most recently, that...
Put away your half-started manuscripts and tragic hopes, creative writing minors. In an economy like ours, your chances of publication are bleak - unless, that is, you have unlimited access to a mind-enhancing...
Four years in Tuscaloosa, and I'm beginning to despair that I am the only person on campus who has read Mervyn Peake's “Gormenghast” series. I told myself last spring that if I got that Lifestyles...
Edwin Windsor is not a super villain. True, he has the perfect name for it, as well as the additional prerequisites of extraordinary wealth, cold hyper-rationality, impeccable taste in suits, a flawless...
Armed with a flame gun, an axe and an unshakeable conviction in the rightness of his cause, the 16th President of the United States stands ready to fight for the nation his fathers brought forth four score...
In this bleak and empty wasteland of the post-Harry Potter world we live in, it’s inevitable that any book about twenty-somethings at a school for magic will come under the closest scrutiny. That would...
This month, TIME magazine christened novelist George R. R. Martin, author of the epic fantasy series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the “American Tolkien for a jaded age.” Possibly, it’s the two Rs...
As it turns out, Ayn Rand isn’t the only libertarian-ish science fiction writer I can name (and on that note, it’s Ayn as in “fine,” not Ann as in “can.”) If you’ve visited Gorgas lately,...
There’s nothing fun about the end of the world. When I wasn’t teleported up to the pearly gates on May 21, I nearly freaked out realizing that I did, after all, need to study for my GRE on the 27th....
Ayn Rand’s name was everywhere a couple years ago, when Tea Partiers started brandishing “Who is John Galt?” signs to protest increasing government intervention in the economy (and various other...
