Ever since Snow White, Disney had been struggling with two separate animation issues: effects sequences and the process of transferring animation art to film without going disastrously over budget.… | Continue reading
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engine… | Continue reading
A number of actors who appeared in The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies have joined forces with author Julia Golding to launch a campaign called Project Northmoor, an effort to purch… | Continue reading
Scientist, Hugo Award winner, and prolific science fiction author and editor Ben Bova passed away on Sunday, November 29, 2020 at the age of 88, Tor.com is able to confirm. The author of more than … | Continue reading
Peter Watts’ Blindsight looked at first contact with aliens in a different way when it was first published in 2006, and it’s been one of those books that friends have fervently recommen… | Continue reading
Steampunk is rooted in the maker philosophy. It rejects mass production and the smooth, factory-fresh minimalism of futurist design and instead embraces the one-of-a-kind, the handmade, the maximal… | Continue reading
I’m always looking for new works to review for Because My Tears Are Delicious To You, an ongoing series on my own website. There I revisit some of the books I loved as a teen. Recently I put out a … | Continue reading
I was sitting down with a couple of my fellow programmers after a long day of testing our new online shopping cart, and we asked ourselves a very important question: Why don’t most science fiction … | Continue reading
I was all set to finish a piece on the characters who inhabit the world of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, the advanced space-humans and artificial intelligences that drive the novels with th… | Continue reading
Sometimes, you’re haunted by your own stories. I wrote “So Much Cooking” in 2015: in it, a food blogger describes cooking in quarantine during a pandemic, feeding an ever-increasing number of child… | Continue reading
“Why isn’t Greg Egan a superstar?” Jon Evans tackled this question on Tor.com in 2008. More than a decade later, perhaps the relevant question is: “Why isn’t Greg Egan’s fiction getting film or TV … | Continue reading
2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem, and ahead of that centennial, MIT Press has reissued a series of some of his lesser-known work, inc… | Continue reading
Linguistic worldbuilding can be fairly simple—like making up and incorporating a few slang words or insults based on whatever your fictional culture finds profane—or it can be elaborate, like inven… | Continue reading
A police force in England recently put out a Facebook appeal to try and track down the owner of a “distinctive silver ring” that was recovered at a crime scene. The ring? A replica of t… | Continue reading
Christopher Tolkien died last week at the age of 95. The third of J.R.R. Tolkien’s four children, he was his father’s literary executor and the editor of his posthumous works. He whipped The Silmar… | Continue reading
If you took the most Cronenbergian episodes of The Magic School Bus, blended them in a cosmic meat smoothie with the avanc from China Miéville’s The Scar, and then sprinkled in some good ol&#… | Continue reading
Christopher Tolkien, the son of J.R.R. Tolkien who continued his father’s publishing legacy, has died, according to The Tolkien Society. He was 95. | Continue reading
The Folio Society has been publishing premium illustrated editions of classic works since 1947, including many iconic science fiction and fantasy titles. They’ve just released a beautiful edition o… | Continue reading
Thrifters and used-book nerds alike can appreciate the reward of digging through piles of items to find one very special, very precious piece. That’s what happened to one Reddit user, who vol… | Continue reading
“Not to go on all fours. That is the Law. Are we not Men?” So says one of the most enigmatic characters of early science fiction—the Sayer of the Law, from H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Dr.… | Continue reading
“So, she pulls out this book…” The way my friend turns on his barstool and smiles tells me this is going to be something good. We’re sitting at a quiet bar, chatting about his latest acting gig—Muc… | Continue reading
“It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them.” —Night Watch (2002) In the Discworld series, Ankh-Morpork is the Ur-city, of… | Continue reading
Fantasy maps usually reside in a book’s endpapers, or in the front of the book. They’re part of a fantasy novel, but not necessarily a part of the narrative: they are, as Stefan Ekman has pointed o… | Continue reading
It’s 1985. There’s a new film out with an almost too twee title, Ladyhawke. Supposedly it’s based on a medieval legend, but really it’s a secondary-world fantasy with fairytale overtones. It’s lush… | Continue reading
Russell Hoban said that he was a good speller before he wrote Riddley Walker and a bad speller after finishing it. The first sentence shows why: “On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear … | Continue reading
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engine… | Continue reading
If publishing a book takes one year, then why do George R. R. Martin’s publishers only need three months? Learn how blockbuster novels can change the book production process. Update: In early 2017,… | Continue reading
The science fiction and fantasy community has lost a beloved icon. We are extremely sad to report that author and SFWA Grand Master Gene Wolfe passed away on Sunday, April 14, 2019 after his long b… | Continue reading
The people of Gaant are telepaths. The people of Enith are not. The two countries have been at war for decades, but now peace has fallen, and Calla of Enith seeks to renew an unlikely friendship wi… | Continue reading
This year for Tor.com’s birthday, we’re initiating a tradition of Rocket Stories! For this inaugural year, enjoy an exclusive read of “A Tall Tail” by Charles Stross a week … | Continue reading
I used to live on the roof of the world, trying to understand why some stories get preserved for millennia and other ones disappear. I spent three years there. I wasn’t alone: I had colleagues with… | Continue reading
The future is arriving sooner than most of us expected, and speculative fiction needs to do far more to help us prepare. The warning signs of catastrophic climate change are getting harder to ignor… | Continue reading
In 1974, Gerard K. O’Neill’s paper “The Colonization of Space” kicked off what ultimately proved to be a short-lived fad for imagining space habitats. None were ever built, but the imag… | Continue reading
Truman Burbank is living the good life on idyllic Seahaven Island. Sure, his college sweetheart warned him that he was the target of a conspiracy, but she was having a nervous breakdown and soon mo… | Continue reading
Has this ever happened to you? You’re living on a perfectly good planet in orbit around a perfectly acceptable star—and then suddenly, the neighbourhood goes to crap and you have to move. For a lot… | Continue reading
A few years ago, I read Kalpa Imperial and The Three Body Problem in quick succession, and I said to myself, I have GOT to make my SFF reading more global! And if there’s one thing I’ve learned fro… | Continue reading
Mae and Ira Freeman’s 1959 children’s picture book You Will Go To the Moon promised a glorious near future of crewed spaceflight, as did later books like G. Harry Stine’s The Third Industrial Revol… | Continue reading
As you’ve probably heard, Amazon has announced that it’s producing a show set in Middle-earth, the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien in his landmark novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. With … | Continue reading
Time is nobody’s friend. Authors in particular can fall afoul of time—all it takes is a few years out of the limelight. Publishers will let their books fall out of print; readers will forget about … | Continue reading
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engine… | Continue reading
I was lucky enough to grow up in an age when people weren’t as worried about safety. Especially transportation safety. That’s why: I remember the brief glorious moment of flight when jumping an old… | Continue reading
Earlier this year, author V.E. Schwab delivered the sixth annual J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford. With her permission, we are proud to present the text of t… | Continue reading
It is customary for old folks (such as me) to fulminate loudly about change. The new is puzzling; loss of the old and the familiar is sad. What do I miss? The Bussard ramjet¹. The Bussard ramjet pu… | Continue reading
’Cause it’s gonna be the future soon, And I won’t always be this way, When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away —Jonathan Coulton, “The Future Soon” Lawrence’s cubicl… | Continue reading
I recently reread three thematically similar books: Poul Anderson’s Virgin Planet, A. Bertram Chandler’s Spartan Planet, and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Ethan of Athos. All three imagine single-gender p… | Continue reading
Warner Brothers had been trying to develop a Speed Racer film for nearly two decades, but the project never really launched until it was suggested that perhaps the Wachowskis should direct somethin… | Continue reading