I have been in love with the Universe since I was a kid. Astronomy has always been my passion, and eventually became my career. This drove me to get my astronomy PhD and work on Hubble for a decade before starting to write and do public outreach about science. I’ve been on podcasts, radio, TV, and consulted for books and blockbuster sci-fi movies. I love science and science fiction – stories are one of the most powerful ways we relate to the Universe. I live and breathe this stuff every day, and my greatest joy is motivating that passion for science in others.
Astronomer Mike Brown is dedicated to finding small icy worlds beyond Neptune.
His discovery of the frozen object Eris in 2005—only slightly smaller but more massive than Pluto—is credited for kick-starting the official debate of how we define a planet, and this book is his personal telling of that story.
He weaves it together with the birth of his daughter in a well-told and engaging tale that will give you insight on how discoveries can change how we see the Universe.
The solar system most of us grew up with included nine planets, with Mercury closest to the sun and Pluto at the outer edge. Then, in 2005, astronomer Mike Brown made the discovery of a lifetime: a tenth planet, Eris, slightly bigger than Pluto. But instead of its resulting in one more planet being added to our solar system, Brown’s find ignited a firestorm of controversy that riled the usually sedate world of astronomy and launched him into the public eye. The debate culminated in the demotion of Pluto from real planet to the newly coined category of “dwarf” planet.…
I'm a linguist by trade with an MA in Intercultural Communications. I'm also an immigrant in my chosen country. You could say I have a fascination for different worlds/cultures in my blood. But those cultures only really come alive with the people that live in them, the way they think, feel, and talk, and especially where their cultures meet, with all the tensions, heartbreaks, love and hate, misunderstandings, fear, and courage that reverberate in those encounters.
A seemingly perfect society and its ugly underbelly always make for a compelling read. But this one goes a step beyond with compassion, culture-clash, inclusivity, sheer storytelling genius, and characters I was rooting hard for through every page. Luckily, since I couldn't get enough, there are quite a few sequels.
In a world where the marginalized of society are sent into space on suicide missions, one woman decides to fight back: “Riveting” (David Feintuch).
In Expendable, the first volume of the League of Peoples, Festina Ramos is assigned to escort an unstable admiral to planet Melaquin. Little is known about Melaquin, for every explorer who’s landed there has disappeared. It’s come to be known as the “planet of no return,” and the High Council has made a habit of sending troublesome admirals there in an attempt to get rid of them. It’s clear that this is intended to be Ramos’s…
When I was growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, my father and I watched Star Trek reruns together. He was so busy traveling all over the world with his job that our time watching Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock was precious to me. I loved it so much that I built my own Enterprise models and sewed a boxful of tribbles. More importantly, that show led me to reading tons of science fiction - everything from Isaac Asimov to Douglas Adams - and, of course, watching every Star Trek sequel ever made. Live long and prosper.
I loved the humor of this novel: Prot – who claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX – is charming and funny and absolutely wins over everyone he meets. You can’t not want him to be who he says he is. Is K-Pax a real planet? Is Prot a real alien or does he suffer from a mental illness? If you’ve seen the movie, that’s a start, but the book is better and there are sequels. It’s told from his psychiatrist’s point of view so we get a lot of background on him and how he relates to Prot. In many ways, the book tells us more about what it’s like for us to be humans than for Prot to be an alien.
When a man who claims to be from outer space is brought into the Manhattan Institute, the mental ward seems to be just the place for him. However this patient is unlike anyone psychiatrist Dr. Gene Brewer has had under his care before. Calling himself 'prot', he has no traceable background but says that he is an inhabitant of the planet K-PAX, a perfect world without wars, government or religion, and where every being coexists in harmony. Setting a departure date - August 17th at 3.31am - on which he plans to return home on a beam of light, 'prot'…
My books are non-fiction. However, the best stories are always how a character really changes. These books brought permanent change to me. One important value I see evaporating in this world is the ability to ask honest questions and the courage to willingly follow the evidence. I try to give readers a fresh and inspiring look at things like never before. Similarly, with every book recommendation, each author brought me a new perspective and added unexpected formats for learning. My advice is if you want to specialize in something, pursue diversified learning to maintain solid footing instead of specializing yourself into some specialized niche. Never lose your curiosity.
I came across this, now out of print, booklet as a 19-year-old who could not believe the majority of the planet would believe something incorrect. This guy was a lone voice against the tide of overpopulation panic.
The information he provided was easily confirmed with math or encyclopedia references. It is completely a Q&A format. Very strange, at first. It was as if he expected me, the reader, to reach my own conclusions based on the information alone. That was new for me. He did not coax me or summarize his conclusion. This influenced my writing style for life. It respects the reader as having a mind of his own.
The 2nd most impacting part about this was ultimately, that yes, the whole world could literally be wrong. Shocking!
I’m a teacher, sailor, kayaker, and environmental-vegan animal lover. I live by the sea among marine wildlife. I grew up sailing, then sailed the Pacific on the tiny wooden boat that was my first marital home. We had no engine, no modern technology. Like the sea beings, we had a wing in the wind and a fin in the sea so we lived in their world, on their terms. Alone, helming under the stars, I dreamed of dolphin culture and mentally made lists of possible dolphin vocations. This helped me create fiction from the dolphin viewpoint. Input from scientists brought authenticity to my marine environmental fantasies and messages.
This long narrative poem has the most lyrical descriptions of sailing I’ve ever read, so back in my teens, I memorized it. It takes 30 minutes to recite. While voyaging under sail in the Pacific, reciting it twice would get me though the first lonely hour of my long night watch. Even today, reciting the poem sends my spirit back to the open sea.
The first turning point of the story is when the charismatic albatross is shot for no reason. The second turning point is when the mariner breaks the curse by overcoming his revulsion for the ocean’s non-charismatic “slimy things that crawl” and he blesses them. So we learn to value all life, charismatic or not.
Great title poem plus "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," 20 other sonnets, lyrics, odes: "Frost at Midnight," "The Nightingale," "The Pains of Sleep," "To William Wordsworth," "Youth and Age," more. All reprinted from authoritative edition.
This set of books helped to form my character and my sense of possibility. I think the same passion for these stories and ideas has led me to study the unconscious and dreams. I also am passionate about the earth and caring for nature; the Elven magic deepened my sense of its sacredness while stretching my mind into the fun of creating magical realms. I think it’s a moral code but also a playful way of thinking and being. Other ways I’ve continued from these works, coupled with my love of language, is an extensive study of the Ancient Futhark, the runes, which have magical power in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
This book carried a concept of shared thought that enchanted me. Colonists find themselves marooned on a planet of simple technologies. At a certain season, a flower sends pollen through the air that causes special connective telepathy and healing powers. They form a society based on royal families but there’s a group that melds minds which is beautifully depicted. This series raised in me a fascination with the idea of closeness of mind and connection. Amid the challenges of a primitive society blended with increasing amounts of outer, technologically advanced influence as their planet is eventually discovered, the mind is shown to still be the most powerful.
As a woman of color, impassioned reader, and author to boot, I'm always advocating for inclusion in my romance reads. All of my romances feature a lead or leads of color and I'm particularly drawn to books where I can identify myself in the heroines. I like to provide other readers of color with the same experience through my books, while writing compelling romances that can be enjoyed by anyone. I have published 12 novels, with 4+ coming out in 2022. I've hit the bestseller charts on Amazon in SciFi romances and multicultural romances with every new release. You can expect my Xiveri Mates series in audio, French, and German as early as March 2022.
His to Claim pushes the reader through a wide spectrum of emotions. One interesting point is that you see a possessive hero in a romance novel work to embrace emotions. A dark romance novel it features a bride hunt trope that lands our main characters into a variety of cultural understandings which give insights into how we handle our own misunderstandings.
My alien overlord is huge, all-powerful, and determined to claim me. Every human girl growing up on New Terrhan knows one thing … that she will be taken by one or several Xalthurian males when she turns twenty-one. The Xalthurians are rough, domineering, and huge all over, but this is the deal our leaders struck so that they would provide our human colony with desperately needed supplies. If the baby born from our taking is a girl, we will be allowed to keep it. If the baby is a boy, it will be taken away, never to be seen again.…
I am a lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy from all eras, coming from a family that was obsessed with both science and speculative fiction. I am the co-creator of Forbidden Futures magazine, the world’s only full color, fully illustrated genre fiction periodical, and I have been writing and publishing science fiction and horror comics, art, and stories for over four decades. I have contributed to the worlds of Star Wars, Aliens VS Predator, Dungeons and Dragons, DC and MARVEL comics, and The Wheel Of Time. I am an instructor teaching fantasy illustration, comics, and graphic novel writing at The Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
This story imagines a human colony on an alien world that is both terrifying and surreal.
One by one the colonists meet strange fates or murder each other, until they all wake up to discover the entire sequence of events was a virtual reality—a diversion designed to occupy them while awaiting an unlikely rescue from otherwise certain doom. However, elements from the virtual reality escape into the waking world, leading to salvation for at least one of the voyagers.
This book will keep you guessing right up to the end, and beyond, making the reader consider what is real, what is religion, and what do we want most out of life.
From Hugo Award–winning author Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death is a sci-fi murder mystery set on a mysterious planet where colonists experience unexplained shifts in reality and perception.
Delmak-O is a dangerous planet. Though there are only fourteen citizens, no one can trust anyone else and death can strike at any moment. The planet is vast and largely unexplored, populated mostly by gelatinous cube-shaped beings that give cryptic advice in the form of anagrams. Deities can be spoken to directly via a series of prayer amplifiers and transmitters, but they may not be happy about it.
My passion for Mars began when I stumbled upon an old newspaper article from 1926 about a lawyer who was in telepathic communication with a Martian woman named Oomaruru. How could I not be intrigued? As I dug into the story, I learned about his attempts to send telegrams to Mars, his disappointment at our scientists for not being smart enough to receive their responses, and the many other interesting beliefs about intelligent Martians that were prevalent at the time. The more I learned about this early history of Martians, the more fascinated I became. It all led me on the path to what became The Big Book of Mars.
There are so many science fiction books about Mars, so I wanted to choose at least one of the more obscure ones. This one is particularly interesting because it explores the idea of a universe in which the many famous Martian tales that came before it, like John Carter of Mars, were based on actual beings and events—the details were just embellished and perhaps misremembered a bit by the authors.
Growing up on a small farm, my brother and I listened to crudely recorded Star Trek episodes. We didn’t have much, but our imaginations gave us infinity. Then life happened. To reclaim childhood wonders after losing myself in a long tech research career at Bell Labs, I transitioned into planetary science. Now I ‘live in space,’ but remotely, through cold machines. What will the future hold for people who actually live on other worlds, touching and smelling alien soil and solving alien challenges in their thoroughly alien lives? When I write, I dream, understand (sometimes), and strive to pass the experience on to new generations of readers and dreamers.
When planetary scientists study Mars, we characterize resources and—distantly and coldly, visualize how those resources might be used someday. Yet you can’t truly understand a place until you have lived there. This book invites us to live on Mars by following the troubles of Amber, a teenager growing up in a remote pressurized trailer with her larger-than-life father. What are her goals and talents? What does she worry about every day? Who does she love, hate, and strive to understand? Since Mars is all she has ever known, she struggles to relate to settlers who carry old-Earth baggage around with them. Mars is new and exciting! Getting inside Amber’s head lets us get inside our own. We can never think like Amber, but we can try.
"In the Shadow of Ares" is a 2012 Prometheus Award finalist.
The third exploration mission to Mars vanishes in 2029 without a trace. Two decades later, the success of human settlement of Mars and the life of a young girl hinge on the secret of what happened to the Ares III mission...
In 2051, Mars is a growing outpost of humanity, and 14-year-old settler Amber Jacobsen is a minor interplanetary celebrity – 'the First Kid on Mars'. But pioneering is hardly glamorous work,and Amber wishes she were just an ordinary girl living on Earth.
