Mar 26, 2020

Pandemics are a recurring trope in science fiction, but this turns out to be surprisingly unhelpful when we're facing a contagion in reality. We talk to Mike Chen, author of the new pandemic novel A Beginning at the End, about how science fiction uses disease as an allegory for almost everything except, well, disease....

Mar 12, 2020

Everything is bloody terrifying right now, what with the pandemic and the would-be strongmen and the natural disasters. So it's easy to retreat into nihilistic storytelling, which revels in the destruction of civilization. But screw that --- when you root for the destroyer, you're rooting for unimaginable suffering...