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Anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s beloved 1985 sci-fi novel, Ender’s Game, can understand why, for the past 20 years, Hollywood has been unable to adapt the book. After all, it’s challenging enough to shoot a movie about pint-sized military recruits fighting each other in a futuristic, space-set Battle School, but it’s an even taller order to capture the novel’s complex themes about war and morality...

Frederick Jackson Turner changed the face of American history when he introduced his thesis on the importance of the American Frontier experience in 1893. While not initially embraced his work is seminal in understanding how historians and even the public viewed the frontier for almost a hundred years. In Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner we find a succinct series of essays on the American frontier and how it shaped the United States. This powerful collection of essays encompasses Turner’s frontier thesis. No single American Historian has had such an effect on our culture. His ideas are so poignant that they stretch...

The UK's first official Star Trek convention for more than a decade has brought together all five captains from across the TV show's 50-year history. BBC News was there to witness the occasion.

Forget Wimpy Plans and NIMBYs, Let's Solve the Energy Crisis by Blowing Up Mercury Posted by Derek_Mead on Wednesday, Apr 04, 2012 Save this post NextPrev Add This With all the squabbling about oil killing us all, climate change screwing with polar bears, nuclear plants falling apart, solar panels sucking on a cloudy day, and wind turbines scything through migratory birds with a gory violence best explained by an Omega Crom song, there’s a big point that all the complainers in the energy debate are ignoring: These days, we are being huge wimps. Millennia ago us humans were building...

This week the Enquiring Hitchhiker has several new interviews. The first of these is with  Dr. Gregory Benford. Dr. Benford is one of the leading authors of hard science fiction working today. His novel In the Ocean of Night was one of my first introductions to the idea of artificial intelligence.

There's a hierarchy of "Star Trek" inventions we would like to see become reality. We already have voice-controlled computers and communicators in the form of smartphones. A working Holodeck is under development. Now, how about we get some impulse engines for our starships? The University of Alabama in Huntsville's Aerophysics Research Center, NASA, Boeing, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating on a project to produce nuclear fusion impulse rocket engines. It's no warp drive, but it would get us around the galaxy a lot quicker than current technologies. According to Txchnologist, the scientists are hoping to make impulse drive...

Link only, per agreement with Gannett.

This article is going to make many people angry. I don’t care because it needs to be said. Doctor Who has become fan wank. I am not slamming the performance of Matt Smith who I think is brilliant as the Doctor. I am slamming this current season’s writing staff and their inability to craft a believable Doctor Who story.

By any honest measurement Barack Hussein Obama has been a dismal failure as a President. Few if any Presidents have been given as much power in their first term as Obama and done so little. In fact for two years he had an unassailable super majority in congress and still his administration has been unable to do something as simple as craft a budget much less control runaway unemployment, a crippling deficit, and the terrorist overthrow of the middle east. While contemplating how anyone could do much worse than Obama, it came to me: Obama is such a failure that...

...The one thing modern education does not do very well is teach critical thinking and this needs to change. In my own life, it was the hall way bull sessions of high school and college that probably did more along this line than any class. In Space Cadet, this took the form of the hall way bull session, but in Starship Troopers it was an actual class called History and Moral Philosophy...

The Hugo Awards! Nothing does the heart of a sci-fi, horror, fantasy fan more good than to see his favorite author or movie win a Hugo or look on past glories of Hugos gone by. Personally, as I looked through the winners old and new, I began to reflect on how much many of the winners and nominees affected my life and influenced my thought. I felt I had to get this down of digital paper for my own benefit. There may be other authors and movies you as a reader hold dear, but these are the ones that...

We had the pleasure to interview J. Neil Schulman last week. He is the author of the Novel Alongside Night and has twice won the Prometheus award for his work. Currently Mr. Schulman is working on a movie based on Alongside Night.

This week we interview author John Ringo. He has had several books on the New York Times best seller list and he has over two million books in print. Ringo’s specializes in military science fiction. The Hitchhiker asks… Question 1- After reading There Will Be Dragons I had a sense that Heinlein had influenced your writing. Are you a fan of his work? Very much so. Heinlein is the absolute sine qua non of science fiction authors. While I haven’t read all of his works, I’ve read most and he’s definitely my favorite SF author influencing both my writing and...

Larry Niven is one of the old guard of hard science fiction writers. His ringworld Novels are some of the most widely read science fiction novels of all time. It was our pleasure to interview him for the site.

Presented at: Chicon 7, Chicago, Illinois, August 30-September 3, 2012 Toastmaster: John Scalzi Base design: Deb Kosiba Awards Administration: Diane Lacey, Jeff Orth, David Gallaher, John Platt, Helen Montgomery

The 2012 Hugo Awards ceremony will be streamed live tomorrow, Sunday, September 2, 2012 from the 70th World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). The ceremony is scheduled to begin at 8:00pm CDT. This year's Worldcon is being held in Chicago. It began August 30 and will end September 3, 2012. You can watch the ceremony online here. You can also follow live text coverage here. This is the list of the nominees. For more information, please see the Chicon 7 site and the Hugo Awards site.

One of the great tragedies in the history of science fiction was the premature death of the writer Stanley Weinbaum. His death in 1935 at the age of just thirty-three cut short his writing career which had barely lasted for a year and a half. Even sadder still is that he is nearly forgotten today when in a just world he would continue to be remembered as one of its great authors. Although his first story, “A Martian Odyssey”, remains an oft-anthologized classic, the rest of his oeuvre remains largely inaccessible to contemporary readers. This is almost criminal, for while...

Actually, I would appreciate if people didn’t remake anything. Some originality would be nice.  While, I would appreciate no remakes, this goes double for ones with Arnold Schwarzenegger.It as actually quite interesting how many of Arnold’s films were science fiction or fantasy based.  It is also interesting how every remake of one of them is a complete flop.  The latest edition of Total Recall going to the remake scrap-heap is prime example.  Great CGI, No originality and No Arnold equals epic fail.  It seems the original which was recently called ‘cheesy’ by some critic did far better at the box office than the new one which...

As part of the L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text “time capsule” of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out.

We have a special treat for our readers this morning. One of my all time favorite authors Dr, Jerry Pournelle. Having co-authored my third favorite book Lucifer’s Hammer (1 and 2 are both Heinlein works). I was a little nervous to contact him and more nervous to actually ask for an interview. Luckily I got over that and I am very proud to present this interview for our audience here at the Freehold.