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Starman actor Ken Utsui passed away on March 14, 2014, of chronic respiratory failure. He was 82. Although Utsui was a prolific actor for many decades, he is best known in the United States as Starman (a.k.a. Super Giant), the Shintoho superhero who fought a bevy of outlandish creatures in the late 1950s.

Richard Coogan, who played Captain Video on the early TV sci-fi adventure series Captain Video and His Video Rangers, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 99.

Dubai: At a conference in Dubai this week, an American futurist painted an intriguing, at times unsettling, picture of the coming world. As Dr Peter Diamandis went over his presentation slides at The Government Summit on Tuesday, there were plenty of raised eyebrows. In the future, the slides suggested, privacy will be a thing of the past, robots will take over our jobs, 3D printers will pop out everything from human organs to houses, and man will mine asteroids in deep space for unfathomable mineral wealth. The 58-year-old said hyper-tech breakthroughs are already hurtling us towards that future, today. “The...

I found this particular old time radio episode very reminiscent of themes in Star Trek, Outer Limits, Ray Bradbury, and Twilight Zone. Furthermore, it was very interesting to hear about the "Holodeck" and distopian, robotic, disassociated society the family lives in. I think you will find the same similarities and more, and look forward to comments. You can find this episode at http://archive.org. I posted the original podcast link to give props to the podcast that put this one online for their show.

It's another year chock full of exciting pictures to look forward to!

Actress Alexandra Bastedo, best known for her role in the 1960s television sci-fi series The Champions, has died aged 67 following a long illness.

Imagine a world where a handheld gadget scans your body and diagnoses illnesses in seconds - reducing hospital visits and potentially saving your life. It may sound like the work of science fiction but engineers in California have taken their lead from the Star Trek franchise and developed a real-life version of the show’s medical tricorder. The Scanadu Scout can read a person’s temperature, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and more, simply being held against their forehead. It was developed by Scanadu’s CEO Walter De Brouwer, 56, at Nasa’s Ames Research Centre in California. A prototype of the Scout was...

Happy National Science Fiction Day! January 2nd is the day selected for this wonderful holiday because it was Isaac Asimov's birthday. It's a day to celebrate, appreciate, and even read some of the many science fiction offerings at your local library, bookstore, website, or your own bookshelf.

I have been down with a nasty cold for the last few weeks. The good side of that is that I have been catching up with my reading, which included the last couple of issues of "Analog...Science Fiction and Fact". I was reading along and enjoying the stories, until I got to "Not for Sissies" by Jerry Oltion in the March 2014 issue, at which point my jaw dropped. This story is nothing more than gay pornography. The first line is: "Nathan was eating breakfast in the kitchen when his husband, Greg, announced that he was going to die." And...

It would be easy to miss, but December 18 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alfred Bester, one of the pioneers of modern science fiction. A Manhattan native, Bester began his career as a writer in earnest in the 1940s, publishing pulp science fiction, penning radio scripts, and doing work for DC Comics on Superman and Green Lantern titles. In the 1950s, however, he followed the trend of science fiction away from the short story magazine world to the realm of novels. It was in this decade that he wrote two of the genre’s most groundbreaking works, The Demolished...

THERE THEY were, just below Martha Stewart and Paula Deen and Allure in the magazine rack at the supermarket: the gun periodicals. I bought three. Back at the place where I was staying — this was in upstate New York, a week ago — I pored over the ads and the editorial content, trying to understand what they were saying, and to whom. First, they want you to buy a gun. It will probably not be your first gun; it will be an addition to, and an improvement on, the gun or guns you already own. It may deliver “precision...

Everybody (well, everybody who reads sf/fantasy) has their favorite novels in each genre...which are usually a bunch of other people's favorite novels as well. This only makes sense, since cream rises to the top. But even so, there are plenty of obscure books that for whatever reason, never really caught on. They might well be great reads, but no one seems to have heard of them...so what's your favorite sf and fantasy novel that still lies in not-so-deserved obscurity? With any luck, we'll all discover a bunch of great books that we've never heard of before! I'll start off with...

One of the things that makes science fiction so popular is that it means many things to many people. Some people will insist that they are not even reading science fiction when they read a Star Wars novel or a novel dealing with alternate history. That is what makes Sci-Fi so wonderful! It’s easy to love and difficult to define. What other genre has so many sub-genres? You have hard Sci-fi, often times written by people who actually were scientists. There’s Cyber Punk, adventurous Space Opera, Military Sci-Fi, Alternate History, Steam Punk, and even Space Westerns. Something for almost everybody!...

There are so many amazing science fiction movies that it's hard to include all the greats in a list of 50. It may not be the same 50 you'd pick, but I hope you enjoy this list of must-sees. How many have you seen? Click items to mark as completed.

Investigations underwayAir India said Tuesday an investigation was underway after a passenger found worms in his sandwich mid-flight. The passenger made the discovery during a flight from New York to New Delhi on September 28 on India's struggling flagship carrier. The passenger reported the incident to Air India, but said he did not hear anything back for two weeks, according to the Press Trust of India. "We are investigating the caterer regarding this incident," airline spokesman Prasad Rao told AFP in New Delhi. The spokesman said the airline maintained high standards, including hygiene conditions, adding that this was a "very...

The controversy over Orson Scott Card's opposition to gay marriage appears to have simmered down. Maybe it'll kick up again as the Ender's Game premiere closes in, but it shouldn't—Card's religious objection to gay marriage is shared by a substantial minority of Americans, and holding it against him is a little pat. The actual outrage over what's happening to gay Russians appears to have captured all the anger being directed Card's way. That's good! The gay marriage foofarah was a distraction from Card's much more fascinating political paranoia. His last column on politics is a sort of masterpiece of that...

The Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror illustrates the problem with cultures that solve their problems with violence... perfectly.

The Outer Limits debuted on Monday, September 16, 1963 on ABC. Although this imaginative science fiction anthology series was cancelled midway through its second season, it gained a good cult following and proved to be highly influential. The show had several truly fine episodes. The Wikipedia article is very informative. Many of the episodes are available online.

For those who are into this sort of thing...what sfnal or fantasy literature are currently reading or have just finished? I'm working my way through the series, "The Dresden Files" by Jim Butcher, having read the first 10 novels of the 15 published so far. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dresden_Files The Dresden Files is a series of contemporary fantasy/mystery novels written by Jim Butcher. He provides a first person narrative of each story from the point of view of the main character, private investigator and wizard Harry Dresden, as he recounts investigations into supernatural disturbances in modern-day Chicago. Butcher's original proposed title for the...

Today we celebrate the 47th anniversary of Star Trek, as the series’ first episode, “The Man Trap” aired on September 8, 1966. Gene Roddenberry’s “wagon train to the stars” made virtually unknown actors at the time, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei and Walter Koenig, into household names across the United States and around the world.