Eunuchs are the way to go—avoid all the soap opera, all the falling in love and the anger and the possible murder and jealousy, definitely.

As the Director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research, Dr. Tarter has devoted her career to the search for extraterrestrial life.

Elizabeth Bear should be a familiar name for anyone who even dabbles in science fiction and fantasy. Not only did she catapult into the scene by winning the Campbell Award for Best New Author in 2005, she never lost momentum.

Science fiction certainly encourages the asking of the big questions: Who are we, what makes us human, what is our purpose, what is our destiny.

Every year there are some films that push the boundaries of art and technology so far that they redefine our understanding of what “real” is.

With fantasy, you get the luxury of control. Every aspect of the world can be manipulated for your purpose, and the reader is willing to suspend disbelief to a much larger degree than with science fiction.

Hugo and Nebula Award winning author, Greg Bear, has authored over forty books, including Quantico, Darwin’s Children, and The Forge of God. His latest novel is Hull Zero Three, and Halo: Cryptum is due out in January.

“Respect” and “dungeonmaster” are two words I never thought I’d see in the same sentence in any publication, so your question has fulfilled one of my lifetime goals. As for respect, you’re usually being reviled by either your players (even as they ask when the next session is going to be, sometimes with veiled threats) or the community at large in high school, college, or in the working world, and your dating pool slowly and surely shrinks to the radius of a Lilliputian dime.

“Half-Life was conceived as horror first, and always intended to be scary above all else. The atmosphere shaded toward dark, dystopian SF in HL2, but in Half-Life 1 we treated the game as a Technological Gothic, with Black Mesa playing the role of the spooky old castle. The science fiction and horror elements set each other off nicely. At Valve, we are all about contrast. Unrelieved horror, like unrelieved anything, gets tedious, so we make sure our games are rarely flat: You’re either climbing toward a peak, plunging into a chasm, or approaching a dark corner. And when there’s no overt menace, you should be really nervous.”

“Before writing Old Man’s War, I went into a bookstore to see what kind of science fiction was selling; I saw more military SF than anything else, so I decided that’s what I should probably write if I wanted to sell a book. This sounds mercenary to some, but more charitably it was market research. I wanted to sell a book, so I was pretty dispassionate about what book that should be. Now, having chosen military science fiction to write, I made sure it was a book I myself would want to read—market research is fine and good but if you’re not writing something you’d actually want to read, then that book’s probably not going to be something anyone else would want to read either.”