Weird Things – weird ideas worth thinking about from the world of science fiction, fantasy and beyond. Every fortnight Damien talks about a new weird idea and throws it open for you to debate. Do you have a weird idea worth thinking about? Make your suggestion in the comments or tweet @damiengwalter
Bureaumancy: a genre for fantastic tales of the deeply ordinary
Perhaps because of their own deskbound lives, many novelists have been able to find the outlandish stories filed away in the drabbest corners of modern life
Systems fiction: a novel way to think about the present
Seen in literary fiction as well as SF, this genre weaves together complex debates in a way that can offer a clearer view of the future – think Atwood, DeLillo and Asimov
Geek critique: Neil Gaiman and Kameron Hurley pick apart pop culture
Two new nonfiction collections – Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats and Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revoluton – present contrasting perspectives on geek culture today. So what’s the state of it?
Reaching for the stars: a brief history of sci-fi space travel
Stephen Hawking’s plan to launch a nanoship to Alpha Centauri sounds like science-fiction precisely because we’ve been imagining this in books for eons
It's about time: how sci-fi has described Einstein's universe
A century after the publication of the general theory of relativity, sci-fi is still grappling with its implications, and still trying to explain it to the rest of us
Wookie books: the science fiction that inspired George Lucas's Star Wars
Star Wars made science fiction a cultural phenomenon, but the film’s origins lie in other texts, and ancient myths conceived a long time ago, in civilisations far, far away
Urban fantasy fiction: there's more to it than sex with were-leopards
By riffing on the paranormal in a city setting, urban fantasy explores the gamut of human weirdness and has become a publishing phenomenon. How long until it gives us the next Game of Thrones?
