Reading Time: 10 minutes On September 9, scientists and other protesters involved in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) launched their latest direct action by marching daily on the Utrechtsebaan, which is part of the A12 highway around the Hague, in the Netherlands. 2,400 protesters out of around 10,000 were detained by police on Saturday, and a further 500 were detained […]
science fiction
Posted inClimate Crisis
Eco-friendly transportation? The good, the bad, and the pipe dreams
Reading Time: 8 minutes There’s a famous saying about putting a fox in charge of the hen house that grossly underestimates human ingenuity. We are not foxes, and so we have the ability to be much cleverer custodians of institutions we’re still destroying. Why, with our managerial prowess, we can protract the chicken slaughter so it goes on for […]
Posted inFilm/TV
Whose justice will emerge from ‘Under the Cloak of War’?
Reading Time: 13 minutes This week’s main episode of Strange New Worlds, which was moved up to accommodate the surprise early launch of a crossover episode on July 22, enters difficult territory. On the surface, “Under the Cloak of War” bears some resemblance to facets of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which grappled with Klingon-Federation peace and what […]
Posted inFilm/TV
How do we manage our myths around ‘Those Old Scientists’?
Reading Time: 10 minutes I’ll be blunt: I do not like Star Trek: Lower Decks, an animated series set in the timeline for The Next Generation, and a crossover element in the first of this past week’s episodes of Strange New Worlds. When it comes to Trek comedy, the non-canon homage series The Orville is more my cup of […]
Posted inFilm/TV
How what’s ‘Lost in Translation’ can be found again in empathy
Reading Time: 12 minutes What defines a “Trek” story varies between Trekkies, but one abiding feature in many series is the role of trust among crew mates. In a 2019 essay for Uncanny Magazine, Nicasio Andres Reed explored what makes this trust extraordinary. Here’s the way the story often goes, in classic Trek like TNG, DS9, or Voyager: First, […]
Posted inFilm/TV
The ‘Charade’ of showing care in culturally sanctioned ways
Reading Time: 12 minutes When J.J. Abrams adapted Star Trek: The Original Series for a new era of cinema, he made choices that reflected a 21st century shift in representation: no, not by including people from more diverse backgrounds, but by reducing the acceptable parameters for onscreen masculinity in a franchise with a much more storied past. Gone, in […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: How time travel creeps into Trek today
Reading Time: 11 minutes This week’s episode of Strange New Worlds takes us boldly to Canada, but I promise: just because most of the show is set in my birthplace of Toronto, we won’t go off-mission too much to reflect on how it uses the location. I will only say that if you’re buying street meat (veg or otherwise) […]
Posted inFilm/TV
‘Ad Astra per Aspera’: How we escape from hardship into wonder
Reading Time: 11 minutes Last week, I gave the opening episode of Strange New Worlds (SNW) Season Two a bit of a pass: I called it a “mission statement” more than a typical outing from this version of the Enterprise. The plot and script seemed intent on solidifying character gains from the first season, and there were whole sections […]
Posted inFilm/TV
How do we heal ‘The Broken Circle’ in ourselves, our worlds?
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last year, Strange New Worlds offered a breath of fresh air in a sea of Star Trek-themed shows that demonstrated little patience with the original groundwork of the franchise. From Discovery‘s relentless reinvention of its world to serve the lead character’s journey, to Lower Decks‘ erasure of a post-scarcity economy to give us a crew […]
Posted inThe Future
A deluge of artificial stories: The chatbot crisis at Clarkesworld
Reading Time: 5 minutes Two days ago, Clarkesworld shut its doors to tackle a rising tide of story submissions that had all the hallmarks of being generated by chatbots. The surge happened especially as ChatGPT functionality became more widely accessible in the last few months. Solutions have not yet emerged to this problem, but my industry of speculative writers, […]