My grandmother thinks of her father’s lifespan with awe. “He went from the horse and buggy to a man in space,” she repeats wistfully. “I don’t think anyone will ever see progress like that again.” And my mother nudges her, gently, that humanity’s not done yet; and I think about progress like that again, especially […]
Uncanny Magazine would like to thank the following people for supporting us on Patreon. This magazine would not be possible without their support. Space Unicorn Ranger Corps COMMANDERS Alan Zimmermann, Bliss Ehrlich, Crystal Huff, Dain Unicorn, Daniel Sales, Edmund Schweppe, Hisham El-Far, Jayme Lundeen, John Benedetti, Kate O’Connor, Kevin Lyda, Marielle Kaifer, Maureen Empfield, Shana […]
I once saw an older writer than I claim that they were the last generation to grow without TV, and explained this had a big impact on them and their writing. But I was thirty years younger and I also had no television growing up. I grew up on a boat in Grenada and the […]
It’s 1984, I am eight years old, and I am up past my bedtime. I’m doing the thing that would define a good chunk of the rest of my life: sitting in front of pop culture, reacting to it, and working out why that was happening. This particular instance is important, because this is the […]
One of the great criticisms aimed at science fiction and fantasy is that it is “escapist,” framed as if that’s some terrible indictment—and the impulse to escape is a character flaw. This is, to use the Latin: stercore de bovem, or, in the vulgate: bullshit. The idea that escape is inherently tainted is fundamentally an […]
I remember the first time I read a character I wanted to re-write. It was Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody. I was angry that Mad-Eye, who had the same eye that I do, hadn’t actually been the character I had gotten to know in the book. I was frustrated that, like with most of the other disabled […]
Uncanny Magazine would like to thank the following people for supporting us on Patreon. This magazine would not be possible without their support. Space Unicorn Ranger Corps COMMANDERS Alan J. Zimmerman, Bliss Ehrlich, Crystal Huff, Dain Unicorn, Daniel Sales, Edmund Schweppe, Hisham El-Far, Jayme Lundeen, John Benedetti, Kate O’Conner, Kevin Lyda, Marielle Kaifer, Maureen Empfield, […]
This was supposed to be hilarious. But at the age of 49, I’m sitting at my desk staring at hundreds of pages of character sheets, drawings, histories, blueprints, maps, Centaurian language notes, castle budgets, and constitutional documents I created for my imaginary Dungeons and Dragons world as a kid in the 1980s, and I’m overwhelmed. […]
I’ve always had a big imagination. I was the kid who would pretend to be a Power Ranger or come up with intricate backstories for the Mortal Kombat characters via Barbie dolls because surely, they had lives outside of the tournament, right? If I wasn’t playing make believe, I was writing stories in notebooks with […]
Faster than light travel is not scientific. Fight me. Time travel? Not scientific. The list of science fiction tropes and the list of tropes deemed not scientific enough to count as science fiction are pretty much identical lists. So the question becomes: whose science fiction is science fiction? Whose is hard science fiction? Whose science […]