Nonfiction

Interview: Chris Avellone, Game Designer, Fallout: New Vegas

“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.

In Nov. 2010 (Issue 6)

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Charles Yu

by Erin Stocks

By placing the story in India, I was hoping to do two things. First, I wanted to evoke a near-future, fairly plausible world, which I hoped would heighten the emotional realism of what is, admittedly, a not-very-plausible premise. The other idea I had was that by setting it in India, which is, of course, a major outsourcing center in our real world, the story might be able to explore some of the socio-economic and psychological consequences of exporting our crappiest jobs to people on the other side of the world, to wonder a little bit about the limits of outsourcing.

In Nov. 2010 (Issue 6)

Artist Showcase

Artist Spotlight: Kai Lim

by Erin Stocks

Basically, the image revolves around the theme of “cavemen in space.” It was a concept I was toying with for some time. The idea behind it is that in the future, our civilization is growing rapidly, and expeditionary forces or “harvest fleets” are sent out to claim entire worlds, hunting and harvesting alien species for resources and food in order to fuel our expanding race. The twist is that for such an advanced race, our culture and methods are ironically primitive—where cavemen used to hunt wooly mammoths with spears, futuristic hunters now hunt twenty-foot tall aliens with powered-armor and spearguns instead.

In Nov. 2010 (Issue 6)

Editorial

Editorial, November 2010

by John Joseph Adams

Fiction: “Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu, “Faces in Revolving Souls” by Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim, “Ej-Es” by Nancy Kress. Nonfiction: “Feature Interview: Chris Avellone” by Matt London, “The Art and History of Body Modification” by Lori St. Leone, “Five Freaky Futures Your Kids Might Face” by Genevieve Valentine, “God Spots” by The Evil Monkey. Cover: Kai Lim

In Nov. 2010 (Issue 6)

Nonfiction

Five Planets that Will Kill You Dead

by Genevieve Valentine

Aside from the many Class-Ms on which Captain Kirk had disastrous dates, let’s face it: there really is no good planet on which to crash. And if things have already gone so badly that your brave, space-faring expedition has to make an emergency landing on some mapped-but-untested interstellar hinterland, you’re already pretty much up a creek. However, since Murphy’s Law is the overriding constant of the universe, things can always be worse. And with these five planets (some of the galaxy’s wildest), we’ll show you just how bad a planetary crash-landing can get.

In Oct. 2010 (Issue 5)

Nonfiction

Considering Cryonics

by Gregory Benford

From submarines to robots, much of the technology we take for granted today was originally conceived, not by scientists or inventors, but by that biggest of dreamers: the science fiction writer. Once thought wildly impossible, cryonics—the freezing of the recently dead, to be revived and repaired in the future when technology allows—seems to be following that same path.

In Oct. 2010 (Issue 5)

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: John R. Fultz

by Erin Stocks

“Where did it come from? To be honest it was inspired to a large degree by Chuck Palahniuk’s story ‘Guts,’ which is probably the most disturbing and visceral piece of fiction I’ve ever encountered. It literally makes people pass out during public readings. My goal was to achieve that kind of intensity in a science-fiction setting.”

In Oct. 2010 (Issue 5)

Nonfiction

Interview: Marc Laidlaw, creator of Half-Life

by Matt London

“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.”

In Oct. 2010 (Issue 5)

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Joe R. Lansdale

by Erin Stocks

I think there are way too many places for me to know for sure [where this story came from], but I did grow up in the fifties and sixties, when the fear of The Bomb, was at its height. I also grew up on numerous science fiction and monster stories about creatures created by radiation and so on.

In Oct. 2010 (Issue 5)

Nonfiction

When Universes Collide

by Pamela L. Gay

Once upon a time, in an age before civilization, before humanity, before the dinosaurs, even before the Big Bang, our universe…wasn’t. Nothing, nada. Void. It’s scary but true. Once upon a time, our universe didn’t exist, not even as a twinkle in God’s eye.

In Oct. 2010 (Issue 5)