The website of John C. Snider
Quick! Name a working astronaut. Chances are, unless you’re a keen space program enthusiast, that you can’t. But there was a time—Cold War America in the 1960s—when most schoolchildren could readily rattle off the names of Alan Shephard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Shirra, Gordon Cooper, and Deke Slayton: the Mercury Seven, the …
It’s hard to impress upon fans born in the twenty-first century just what deserts television networks and movie theaters were for science fiction in the twentieth century. This is not to say those media were devoid of sci-fi, but with only three networks and five major studios, fans were lucky if there were more than …
[A review of writer/director Adam McKay’s new sci-fi farce, now streaming on Netflix.] We may very well be in the last days of the American Republic. America has been dysfunctional and divided before (see: the Civil War; the Civil Rights Movement), but our current era of partisan rancor seems unprecedented. The internet promised to bring …
Will space exploration forever remain the sole domain of the handful of government space agencies? For decades we’ve taken for granted that the moon, Mars—everything outside the Earth—belongs to nobody and that only big government programs are capable of tackling the colossal challenges posed by launching expensive space probes. Not for long. SpaceDev, the California-based …
[Originally posted in March and April 2000 at SciFiDimensions.com. Dr. Bova died in November 2020. For more about Ben Bova and his lifetime of work, visit BenBova.com] Ben Bova is a busy man. He’s has been a journalist, a teacher, a marketeer, an editor, and, oh yeah…a writer. Having spent many successful award-winning years as …
[Originally posted in March 2000 at SciFiDimensions.com.] Greg Bear is a bit of a prodigy in the science fiction world. He published his first story when he was sixteen, and by the time he was a grown-up he was getting published regularly. He’s had a long succession of immensely popular books that aren’t afraid to …