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Paul Krugman, a few years ago, wrote at length to extol the magnum opus of science fiction grandmaster, Isaac Asimov, theFoundation Trilogy. Prof. Krugman’s reflections thereon are of keen interest. I met Asimov once, 40+ years ago, at a world science fiction convention. I even got him to autograph my Science Fiction Book Club copy of “The Foundation Trilogy.” This compilation of three novels is an SF classic. I, then and since, found it too dull to read in full. (Asimov’s I, Robot then was much more engaging to this long-ago SF geek. But nothing Asimov wrote really rivaled Heinlein’s...

The Tunisian desert region used as a location for the original "Star Wars" and as a tourist destination for fans of the film franchise is now reportedly crawling with a threat more insidious than marauding Sand People — ISIS terrorists. Particularly hard hit has been Tataouine, the Tunisian town that inspired George Lucas to name Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, and now a pit stop for wannabe jihadists headed to join ISIS in nearby Libya, CNN reported. Three men were arrested nearby the town that's just 60 miles from the Libyan border and arms caches were confiscated nearby, one of...

A new patent granted to aircraft, defense and security company Boeing is taking its cues from science fiction. Just like the glowing energy shields seen protecting troops, machines and even spacecraft in Star Wars and Star Trek, the design -- named "Method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc" -- uses energy to deflect potential damage.

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.

Just because a character has been around forever doesn’t mean there aren’t new ways to reimagine it. Damon Hellandbrand, a talented artist based in the U.S., has created a series of images that portray the symbols of the zodiac as twisted, surreal creatures straight out of a nightmarish realm. Hellandbrand does much of his art with various digital illustration programs, but some are born as pencil drawings or watercolors – or “basically whatever medium I’m in the mood for.” He writes that he is inspired by artists like Ralph McQuarrie, Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta, and it’s easy to imagine...

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount Pictures is talks to acquire feature-film rights for the classic sci-fi novel The Stars My Destination for producer Mary Parent. Written by Alfred Bester, the book (better known as Tiger! Tiger! in the U.K. for its opening-page reprint of a William Blake poem) follows a man who is shipwrecked in space for years when one day a rescue crew passes him by. Angered, he channels his energies into seeking revenge and begins scheming. The key art of the book is enough to get anyone intrigued.

An instant candidate for the so-bad-it’s-sort-of-great hall of fame, “Jupiter Ascending’’ is totally bonkers, a sort of black-velvet-Elvis mash-up of “Star Wars’’ and every other sci-fi/fantasy movie of the past half-century right up to “The Hunger Games.” Look, there’s Mila Kunis as another chosen one, spending 10 percent of the movie cleaning toilets! A shirtless Channing Tatum in Mr. Spock ears, trying to pretend he doesn’t love Kunis! And poor Eddie Redmayne — up for Best Actor for “The Theory of Everything” — flamboyantly camping it up (oops, Oscar voting begins Friday) as an intergalactic real-estate mogul-cum-mass-murderer bent on marrying...

Ray Bradbury lived in his 1937 Cheviot Hills home for more than 50 years. After the author of "Fahrenheit 451" died in 2012, the house was readied for sale ... The home, which was purchased in June for $1.765 million, is being demolished. A permit for demolition was issued Dec. 30, Curbed LA reports, and a fan who visited the house over the weekend found it in the process of being torn down ...

What if the Allies had lost World War II, the Nazis had been first to develop the atomic bomb, and the Germans and Japanese had carved up control of United States? That's the premise of the new streaming series from Amazon, The Man in the High Castle — an adaptation of the 1962 book by the same name. And the show is fantastic.N

A spaceship powered by nuclear bombs secretly launched in the 1960s. A colony ship on 100-year journey to spread humanity to the stars. These central themes of the SyFy Channel's epic "Ascension" miniseries this week sound like pure science fiction, U.S. scientists actually worked to build such a spaceship in the 1960s. In "Ascension," a three-part SyFy miniseries that launches tonight (Dec. 15), 600 people live aboard an Orion-class nuclear spacecraft on a mission to Proxima Centauri. The mission launched in 1963, when the Space Race was in full swing and the Cold War made the threat of global nuclear...

The late Philip K. Dick, born 86 years ago today in Chicago, is something of a cautionary figure in American literature: brilliant, prolific, often sloppy, and woefully underappreciated during his lifetime. It was only with the 1982 release of the film "Blade Runner" (loosely based on his 1968 novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") that Dick's work truly began to saturate the mainstream; by that point, he had been dead for four months. In the ensuing three decades, Dick's novels and stories have served as fodder for dozens of Hollywood movies; they have been reissued again and again. In...

Now that the trailer for the seventh "Star Wars" movie is out, you can imagine the anticipation among the millions of fans of the film franchise. And why not? The six "Star Wars" films have been enormous successes: they have grossed over $2 billion domestically at the box office, spawned scores of books, comic books and merchandise (how many kids have their own light saber?) and made household names of characters like Darth Vader, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. They've also been the worst thing ever for the science fiction genre.

Fifty years ago this Thanksgiving the crew of the starship Enterprise walked in front of cameras for the first time and began filming on a new sci-fi show that would make television history: "Star Trek". But the results of the day's filming weren't seen in their intended form for more than 20 years -- and the legendary show nearly didn't make it to the screen at all. The brainchild of former bomber pilot and police officer turned television writer Gene Roddenberry, "Star Trek" was planned to be a utopian sci-fi show featuring a diverse crew exploring the galaxy. It began...

Who doesn't love a dinosaur flick? Well, paleontologists have a few fossil bones to pick with Jurassic World, the latest in a line of dinosaur movies that once bragged about its scientific credibility. The trailer for the new movie, a reboot of the popular 1990s Jurassic Park franchise, was released Tuesday and has already been viewed more than 14 million times on YouTube. Like the original movie, Jurassic World takes place in an island safari park, where tourists visit living dinosaurs cloned from ancient DNA—until one hybrid monster goes rogue. Despite global fervor among fans, dinosaur scientists are not thrilled...

All (good) things must come to an end, as the omnipotent, yet enigmatic, interstellar character Q pointed out to the crew of the USS Enterprise during a particularly harrowing flight. As in Gene Roddenberry-created science-fiction epics, so it is in the world of pop cultural podcasting, which is why this month marks the conclusion of my nearly year-long professional collaboration with my good friend Todd Seavey. Even though Todd is leaving for bigger-and hopefully more lucrative-endeavors, the Perry portion of Seavey and Perry on Culture will persist, as I cycle through a diverse cast of witty anarcho-capitalists willing to plumb...

Jurassic World, the fourth film in the Jurassic Park series, is scheduled for release on June 12, 2015. Colin Trevorrow is the director and Steven Spielberg is one of the executive producers. The official trailer has been released and you can watch it here. More links: WikipediaIMDbWhy did Steven Spielberg invent a new dinosaur for Jurassic World?Official SiteUK SiteNewsFacebookTwitter Of course, many of the dinosaurs depicted in the Jurassic Park series lived in the Cretaceous period rather than the Jurassic period.

The Oscar-nominated "Memento" writer says "everyone would benefit from reading" the sci-fi trilogy HBO and Warner Bros. TV are teaming to produce a series based on Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy that will be written and produced by "Interstellar" writer Jonathan Nolan, multiple individuals familiar with the project have told TheWrap. Nolan, who is already working with HBO on "Westworld," has been quietly developing the project for the last several months. He recently tipped his hand to Indiewire, which asked him, 'what's the one piece of science fiction you truly love that people don't know enough about?'

If you feel a disturbance in the Force, it’s millions of voices suddenly crying out the new title of Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens. The reveal comes as the movie finishes its final day of shooting (with many more months of post-production to come.)

If modern physics is to be believed, we shouldn’t be here. The meager dose of energy infusing empty space, which at higher levels would rip the cosmos apart, is a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion times tinier than theory predicts. And the minuscule mass of the Higgs boson, whose relative smallness allows big structures such as galaxies and humans to form, falls roughly 100 quadrillion times short of expectations. Dialing up either of these constants even a little would render the universe unlivable. To account for our incredible luck, leading cosmologists like Alan Guth and...

The world's crops are being devastated. People face mass starvation. The earth is dying. A team of scientists sets out on an interstellar journey to find a new planet for the people of earth. From Wikipedia:Interstellar is a 2014 science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine, the film features a team of space travelers who travel through a wormhole in search of a new habitable planet... Interstellar premiered on October 26, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. Commercially, it is scheduled for a limited release in North America (United States and...