Elana Gomel For this entry in the Five Novels series, here is something everybody knows about. Time travel? Of course. Back to the Future. The Time Traveler’s Wife. Dark. Etc. But apart from the fact that these are movies, or TV series, and not novels, I would argue that it…

Another instalment in my Five Novels series deals with a convention most of us know from movies: the multiverse. Yes, it is the same multiverse we encounter in films like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, TV series such as The Dark, and the sprawling Spiderverse and other superhero franchises. …

You won’t find this in any other list of SF conventions. Aliens? Of course. Spaceships? Duh. Time machines? Yawn. But what is the Zone? This is the name I give to a very specific SF worldbuilding device, which you are no doubt familiar with but which you have probably never…

The traditional site of a haunting is an old house, or better still, a castle. Ghosts, after all, are memory traces, footprints of history. In the classics of the haunted-house genre, such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the ghosts (who may, or may not, exist) are projections…

No, I am not going to write a history of alien encounters in literature and film. First, I have done it (sort of). My book Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule (Macmillan 2014) is exactly what the title says it is And second…

What is it about dreams that’s so fascinating? Like many writers, I find inspiration in dreams. But I constantly struggle trying to hold onto the memories of my dreams. They are incredibly vivid and overwhelming while they last. But the moment I wake up, they melt away and disappear —…

This year is the anniversary of the greatest forgotten revolution in modern history. This revolution shook the world and redrew its maps. It reshaped not just the present but the future. It wiped away generations of dreams and decades of nightmares. It changed everything. …

It was said it held the secret of eternal life — I stood at the entrance to my cabin, looking across the misty gulf toward the hump of the Island rising out of the bluish sea of clouds. So close and yet so unreachable. When I stepped through the X-web all those years ago and found myself surrounded by people, I…

The pain he had inflicted was too much to bear — Pathetic. That’s what she was being, but the pain was almost unbearable. “I’m never coming back,” she said. Phil shrugged. She wanted to scream at him, shake him so he would wake up. They had been married for five years. They loved each other. …