Once a week, for the past eight-odd years, I overhear it: “It’s GIF, not JIF.” “Actually, it’s officially JIF.” If the arguers are educated in the subject, they’ll rattle through their supporting arguments: It’s JIF because its inventor says so and it’s like “giraffe;” it’s GIF because it stands for “graphics” and…
In Mass Effect: Andromeda, I met new aliens, terraformed entire planets, and had a blast shooting down enemy Kett. None of that matched the sheer delight of Andromeda’s quieter moments, however, when I could sit down to read the email that my crew had sent between missions.
John Gonzalez might have cut his teeth on the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, but the narrative director told Kotaku that helping craft the story for Horizon: Zero Dawn was “hands down the biggest challenge” of his career. Here’s why.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer rocked our world, and it remains one of the all-time greatest TV shows. The story of a fated vampire-hunter who tries to live a normal life in high school, Buffy still has few worthy successors. And it has so much to teach us about good writing.
You often hear people say things like, “no science fiction writer could have predicted the Internet,” when they’re talking about science fiction’s lack of predictive power. But actually, writer Murray Leinster did get a lot right about the Internet, in the 1946 story “A Logic Named Joe.”
The Hobbit author J.R.R. Tolkien contributed two poems to a school magazine in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, back when he was an Oxford don. One is an early version of a poem that later appeared in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (pictured above), while the other is a Christmas poem, set in a landscape not unlike Middle…
A young witch and a wild science genius—the characters in my new novel All the Birds in the Sky don’t even belong in the same book together. They’re misfits in the eyes of the world, but they’re also weird to each other. And that turns out to be the most fun thing to explore. Read an excerpt and see for yourself!
We all love characters who are good at what they’re doing. Nobody wants to root for someone who screws up constantly or walks into traps we can see a mile away. But at the same time, it can be hard to love someone who’s too perfect. So how do you make us believe in, and love, a major badass?
Robert Hewitt Wolfe wasn’t just one of the MVPs of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He also was the developer of Andromeda and a writer on a ton of other shows, including Alphas and Elementary. So it’s great news that he’s writing a middle-grade fantasy book trilogy.
Some of the best writing in Fallout 4 is really easy to miss.
Your favorite mechanical keyboard for 2015 is also your favorite gaming keyboard for 2015. Corsair’s K/Strafe series took down around 35% of your votes, so let’s dig in to the lineup and alternatives.
I have a confession to make. I read the comments. Actually, it’s worse than that. I don’t just read the comments, I enjoy reading the comments. I’ve been getting paid to write on the Internet for more than 15 years, and you, Ungentle Reader—yes, you, the one who used to write “More liberal claptrap!” under my articles…
Once you go mechanical, you never go back. Previously, the murdered out Das Keyboard Model S Ultimate took down the 2013 win in a close race. Now it’s time to revisit. Tell us, what’s your favorite mechanical keyboard?
Hollywood people often say that it’s a miracle there are any good movies at all. Because so much can go wrong, and so many random things have to go right, for a movie to avoid being a hopeless disaster. I can believe this, because in general the difference between the good and bad versions of the same story is often…
You’d better clear your schedule—because October is just packed with amazing science fiction and fantasy books. Including George R.R. Martin’s tales of Westeros long before Game of Thrones. Plus Ann Leckie, Gene Wolfe, Doctor Who and Brandon Sanderson. And the most delightfully weird fantasy spinoff ever!
Screw movies. A great novel can be just as exciting and thrilling as a big-budget Hollywood tentpole. A novel can contain massive, insane action, that movie-makers could never even afford to bring to life. But how do you create an action movie on the page? We talked to 10 of our favorite authors, and here’s what they…
Science fiction and fantasy offer a rich legacy of great books—but that abundant pile of reading material can also be daunting. So sometimes, it’s easier to fake it. We asked some of our favorite writers, and they told us the 10 books that everyone pretends to have read. And why you should actually read them.
Geeks been debating the use of rape as a storytelling device for years, but that debate has come back to the fore in the past couple days, for obvious reasons. Author John Scalzi (Lock-In) offers a useful perspective, based on a lesson he learned early on from a mentor.
The "Men's Adventure" novel is a strange thing. At the height of its popularity, in the late 60s and 70s, it was being written by dozens of peculiar and reclusive authors. But the influence of this weird genre is still felt today. Here's the strange history of Mack Bolan and his many imitators.
Some older fictional characters turn up again and again and again: Count Dracula and his foes, Victor Frankenstein, Dorothy Gale and the denizens of Oz. But Western literature's public domain is filled with excellent characters, many who deserve a bit more limelight.
