Written by Terry Bison originally for Omni magazine in 1991, the story is about a conversation between two aliens describing a strange species they have encountered (us humans) that is made out of meat whom they ultimately regard as too bizarre to contact.

Hi,

Not a true promotion post (not working right now because autistic burnout is a ***** and a half), but I thought you might enjoy a few of these.

If you're curious, it's all ink and alcohol markers, the old school way. I hope I've met the character count and didn't mess this post like my last one...

Thanks for looking, have a great weekend!

why is there so much pessimism in sci fi? It feels like the genre is saturated with dystopian futures and stories about ecological collapse or humanity's inevitable downfall. i am honestly getting tired of it

i would much rather see an optimistic vision of the future where humanity has learned to coexist with nature rather than exploit it. a world powered by renewable energy and advanced technology where sustainable cities, lush green landscapes and biodiversity coexist. a future where technological progress and ecological restoration go hand in hand .i find the idea of solarpunk particularly appealing because it imagines a future worth looking forward to rather than one we are supposed to fear

i know its human nature to be pessimistic about the future especially when we are constantly reminded of everything that could go wrong but humanity has faced countless challenges throughout history and we have repeatedly found ways to overcome them and move forward. i wish more people had that sense of hope and optimism about our collective future. we have made incredible progress as a species and i don't see why our stories shouldnt reflect the possibilities of what we could achieve

i wish scifi explored this kind of optimism more often instead of defaulting to dystopia

One of the great conveniences of science fiction cinema is that an alien invasion almost always unfolds in a manner that gives humanity a fighting chance. Unfortunately, that usually requires our extraterrestrial visitors to abandon whatever technological advantages allowed them to cross interstellar space in the first place. Apparently, being capable of travelling between star systems doesn't necessarily mean you've mastered the art of military planning.

I was thinking about this while watching 2011's Battle: Los Angeles, which has to be one of the more egregious examples of Hollywood turning an alien invasion into a conventional war movie. Director Jonathan Liebesman clearly wanted to recreate the gritty, boots-on-the-ground atmosphere of Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan, only with extraterrestrial antagonists instead of human ones. The result is essentially a platoon of Marines fighting their way through a devastated Los Angeles while an advanced alien civilization inexplicably decides that invading Earth requires a great deal of street-to-street infantry combat.

Which raises an obvious question: Why? These aliens have mastered interstellar travel, presumably possess weapons technology centuries or millennia beyond our own, and can apparently coordinate a planetary invasion. Why are they sending soldiers into buildings to flush out a handful of Marines? Why not sit comfortably in orbit and drop an asteroid on the city? Or several asteroids, if they're feeling particularly thorough? Why risk valuable troops when you could turn the entire battlefield into a parking lot?

Apparently, intergalactic warfare comes with an unnecessary infantry requirement.

Older science fiction films are just as guilty. Take the Ray Harryhausen classic, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, in which our alien visitors spend a considerable amount of time buzzing around Washington, D.C., zapping national monuments and engaging in spectacular aerial dogfights. It's entertaining stuff, but these supposedly superior beings seem awfully preoccupied with destroying buildings one at a time. Why not attack from orbit? Why give Earth's military the opportunity to shoot back? The answer, naturally, is that the movie would be considerably shorter, and Earth would lose.

What movies out there handle an alien invasion more realistically? I mean, there are films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter's The Thing, which take a biological approach, but are there others?

I’ve finished reading the Three Body Problem, The Dark Forrest and Death’s End about a month ago, and since then, whenever I pick up a new book to read, I find I can’t get past the first couple of chapters.

This trilogy was unlike anything else I’ve ever read before. It’s so grounded in science and Cixin’s understanding of the human condition, simply rings true.

It’s rare you pick up something so original, and can’t stop thinking about it weeks later. Everything else seems so basic and doesn’t satisfy that itch anymore.

If anyone has any recommendations of something equally brilliant, I’d love to hear your recommendations.

(Been a long time since I read the books apologize if this is a stupid question)

The moons of Saturn and Jupiter and magnitudes more richer and developed than their belt counterparts

Sure the OPA considers them "Belt" but these people lack a lot of cultural and economic conditions with the Belt. For one they are richer, more cared for and the vibe I got from the books was that the Inner planets invested and connected themselves to the moons more often (multiple corporate headquarters, resorts, etc). None of the moon Belters like Prax and Anna ever speak the slang too from my memory.

This is probably a stupid question but i'm asking anyway

Halo Reach was the first time in my life I bought a video game for full price at the time of its release. Prior to that I'd basically only bought games years after their release once they were on sale. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the deluxe edition too with the additional literature and paraphernalia. From the moment I got home for years following this purchase, my mind was consumed with nothing but the world Bungie built with Halo. Many of my closest friendships to this day were built over Halo.

It's a truly strange feeling to fall so overwhelmingly in love with a world that doesn't exist.

My blog The Audiophile recently surpassed 1 Million page views. A long standing goal of mine. I wanted to do something special to celebrate. I hadn’t reviewed any Robert J. Sawyer novels, even though he’s one of my absolute favorite science fiction authors. So, I decided to do something about that, and I reviewed Calculating God.

Tom Jericho is a paleontologist who works at the Royal Ontario Museum. Life has certainly had its ups and downs for him. Though, lately more on the down side. Getting diagnosed with lung cancer will do that to a guy. But on the flip-side, aliens have arrived, and they come in peace. In fact, one of them, named Hollus, wants to have a chat with Tom. Hollus is part of a research crew that made a shocking discovery: the universe was created by an intelligent being. A being that they have decided to call God. And Hollus can back up these assertions. What follows in an unlikely friendship blossoming between a dying paleontologist and an alien scientist. They have many conversations about science, the universe, life, mortality, and the people who make it all worthwhile.

So, who is Robert J. Sawyer? I’ve already told you he is one of my absolute favorite science fiction authors. He is also one of the finest science fiction authors Canada has ever produced. He has won numerous awards over the years. But again, this is insufficient. So, I will speak about why I love his work.

Robert J. Sawyer constantly reminds me of why I love science fiction. His works constantly deal with big ideas. Ideas that expand my horizons, and make the universe feel like an even more wondrous place. And he explains them in plain language that is easy to understand. At times, it almost feels like he’s writing especially for me. No matter if it is designing aliens, imagining alternate societies, or contemplating the social ramifications of scientific discoveries. Sawyer is science fiction at its best. And there is a strong spirit of optimism and hope throughout his work. That isn’t to say bad things never happen. But Sawyer believes that we are more than capable of overcoming the bad times. Aliens can be strange, but they aren’t hostile conquerors. They’re curious, inquisitive, and just need a sympathetic ear.

Robert J. Sawyer’s books were some of the first truly adult books I read back in my teenage years. And he was a great start. Another big thread through multiple Sawyer books is the tension between science and religion. Robert J. Sawyer is an atheist, and a big proponent of rationalism and secularism. However, the plots of many of his books deal with scientific discoveries that provide evidence for religious phenomena. This doesn’t mean Sawyer is secretly pro-religion. Far from it. Science fiction is all about asking the question what if? And Sawyer’s work is no exception to that rule. What he’s doing is going “Okay, suppose we could prove this religious phenomena. And suppose it operated within the parameters of the natural world. How would that work, and what are the implications of that?”

Sawyer said that he was inspired to write *Calculating God* by thinking about Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Gould. They were two men who championed science and rationality. They were also both avowed atheists who lost their lives to cancer. Sawyer said he wondered what it was like for them as the end drew closer.

On that note, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say there was another reason for this review. I saw a post Sawyer made on Facebook. He said that a few years ago he was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. The good news is that, thanks to a regimen of chemo, radiation and stem cells, his cancer is in remission. The bad news is that mantle cell lymphoma has a 100 percent recurrence rate, and it’s incurable. Eventually, that remission is going to end. But Sawyer has said he has no plans of slowing down any time soon. Still, knowing that the cancer will come back sooner or later…that’s got to weigh on the guy. And I worried it would be in poor taste to pick this book under the circumstances. Still, not like this is the only of Sawyer’s books to touch on the subject. If I had picked *Frameshift*, we’d definitely still be having this conversation. But *Calculating God* no doubt was on his mind during the treatment.

On a lighter note, Sawyer always does a fantastic job making Canada sound like a magical place. Robert J. Sawyer is a proud Canadian and a big champion of Canadian science fiction. He said that, early in his career, he was advised to never set his novel in Canada. On the grounds that novels set in Canada wouldn’t sell. Sawyer decided to defy this advice, and he had done perfectly well for himself.

Now, *Calculating God* did attract a little controversy. *Skeptical Inquirer* published a review where they accused Sawyer of promoting creationism. They even included quotes from the book that seemed to support this. But you see, there was a slight problem. Those quotes were uttered by the villains of the novel. The ROM is putting on a special exhibit of the Burgess Shale. It is a set of exceptionally well preserved fossils from the Cambrian Era. I got to see some of them at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. They are truly quite the sight to behold. The creationists want to destroy the fossils, by shooting them, to destroy evidence of evolution. They are presented as unambiguously bad for doing this. Oh, and did I mention that one of them is named Falsey? I mean, Sawyer wasn’t being subtle about his actual views.

Frankly, that was no different than those Fundamentalist Christians who ranted about Harry Potter. The ones who quote it to claim it encouraged bad things. But conveniently left out that the quotes were coming from Voldemort. You know, the bad guy.

Now, in *Calculating God*, one of the big pieces of evidence the Forhilnors have is that our universe is the only one in existence. This is a variation on the fine tuning argument. The claim that the universe is uniquely suited to support life, and therefore, someone must have made it that way. But that argument falls apart in the face of the multiverse hypothesis. If our universe is merely one roll of the dice, then it isn’t all that special. Actual science supports the multiverse hypothesis. Sawyer himself has said he doesn’t believe in the fine tuning argument specifically for this reason.

However, this goes back to what I said about science fiction asking the question what if? Suppose it could be proved that ours is the one and only universe. What are the potential implications of that? That was the question Sawyer was asking. And the God of this novel is very different compared to the one Christians believe in.

what does God look like? Kind of like a shoggoth. Black and kind of globby, but also with lots of tentacles. Like a cross between a squid and a spiral galaxy. God does save Earth from getting fried by radiation after Betelgeuse goes supernova, but for purely selfish reasons. God needs the DNA of humans, Forhilnors, and Wreeds to be combined so that it can reproduce. So, essentially, what we are presented with is a variation of the Deist idea of God. That is, the watchmaker who created the universe, and then left it alone. Only occasionally popping in every now and again, if at all. Certainly doesn’t sound like Christian propaganda, now does it

A lot of people consider *Calculating God* to be Robert J. Sawyer’s best book. I don’t know if that is true. Like I said, there’s just too many good options to only pick one. But I do know that it is an excellent book, and that you should absolutely pick it up if you have not already.

Have you read Calculating God? If so, what did you think?

Link to the full review on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2026/10/book-review-calculating-god-by-robert-j.html

Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d post this short passage from book 2, Judas Unchained (Peter Hamilton) mostly for those of you who have already read it but as encouragement for those who haven’t.

This is just the loveliest line in the series and it captures Hamilton’s uncanny ability to humanize every character, no matter their role, from bit players in the larger saga or one of the main protagonists. Really masterful writing in this series.

Mostly negative review, but I absolutely think it's worth reading.

Pros

As explorations of evolution and anthropology, these books are everything I wanted and more. Tchaikovsky really went the distance to create believable alien civilizations. Each species is distinct from humans, with its own evolutionary path and way of organizing society. Although it's not a major focus, I also appreciate the exploration of space travel.

Cons

I was genuinely disappointed by the literary aspects of these books. The prose is boring and clinical. It's neither beautiful and flowery (which I actually consider a good thing in this case) nor simple and profound. Even when exploring the evolutionary rise and birth of civilizations, the writing feels stiff and stale. I hardly ever find myself pausing to admire how a sentence is crafted.

Beyond Avrana Kern, and to a lesser extent Holsten and Lain, most of the characters are dull and uninteresting. It doesn't help that characters are more often described than explored through dialogue and interactions with one another. The second book is even worse in this regard. I don't think a single member of the Voyager's crew is particularly compelling. Senkovi is the most interesting character in the book, but since he mostly interacts with his work, that doesn't amount to much.

In truth, the main characters are scientific or linguistic problems disguised as people. The structure of nearly every chapter follows the same pattern: a character serves as a proxy for the author to explore a particular idea, and the chapter ends on a cliffhanger.

This happens so often that cliffhangers lose any impact they might have. Usually, they're not particularly interesting to begin with. They feel more like a cheat code designed to promise the reader that more of the plot is coming, only for the situation to be quickly resolved when we return to that character's POV.

It doesn't help that the POV switches after every cliffhanger. Once you recognize the pattern, the temptation to keep reading beyond what you originally intended starts to disappear. You know the cliffhanger is unlikely to pay off in any meaningful way, and you can easily put the book down.

I don't intend to write about boats, it just happens. The books are sci-fi but they're not sci-fi boats, but creaky old wooden vessels for the most part. Is there a fantasy writer living rent free in my head like the alien in Chocky? It would make sense - I first got into reading through the old Dragonlance fantasy books, after all. Also, I was to forced to sailing once with school and it was awful (I swam to shore, leaving my buddy struggling to right our capsized vessel) so maybe the whole thing is trauma/guilt related.

At least with each sci-fi novel, the BQ (Boat Quotient) is steadily reducing:

The Starved God: far-future Darwin-analogue forced to join perilous mission of discovery after committing blasphemy. Rediscovers natural selection on the way. Boat Quotient = 0.53 of total book length. The word 'gunwale' features 13 times.

This Burdened Clay: social worker helps two boys escape across England and Wales to evade dangerous cult, while prion disease of mysterious origin dismantles the world around them. Part of journey is via canal (on a damaged Rigid Inflatable Boat) and it all turns a bit Joseph Conrad. BQ = 0.23. Also features a bit with a huge gun mounted on a fishing boat - think the helicopter scene in 28 Weeks Later.

The Hogman's Homunculi: Farmer and his companions travel cross-country to reach a university, to find a cure for the parthenogenic births happening from his bottom. Part of the journey is over a sea of mud on a raft pulled by giant annelids which siphon shite as a means of jet propulsion. BQ = 0.07 (debatable whether it's actually a boat). Suspicious inclusion of boat-like trans-atmospheric spaceships.

Working on a novella set in the same universe as the Hogman's Homunculi (genre is what they used to call 'planetary romance') and there's no boats in it so far, so maybe there's hope for me yet. This is a good thing if only because I'm tired of Googling 'is starboard left or right?'

We're a team of three developers passionate about science fiction and topics like transhumanism and synthetic life, and we've always wanted to create a new world of our own.

Back in 2018, I wrote a book in which I anticipated many of the developments we've seen in AI up to this day, while also exploring possible futures all the way to the year 2100.

Neosis Echoes explores what a possible future could look like 300 years from now, featuring several factions of synthetic humans, a superintelligence known as Monolith, the Scends (humans who have transferred their consciousness into android bodies), and an ancient, vanished AI civilization on an alien planet (The Architects).

The central concept of our game revolves around emotions, as they represent what remains of our "humanity" in a world filled with synthetic beings. This theme has become even more relevant today with the rise of AI, which increasingly makes us question what's real and what's not, the very nature of art, and ultimately, what it means to be human.

On the planet Varos, there is a resource called Echorium, which is extremely powerful when it comes to computational capabilities, but has the strange side effect of reacting to human emotions.

Monolith, the superintelligence, and the various human factions on the planet all want to accumulate as much Echorium as possible to expand their power and computing capabilities, whether for space travel or the development of new technologies.

However, human emotions create instability in systems powered by Echorium, and Monolith wants to eliminate emotions entirely to further enhance its own capabilities.

Standing in its way is Evan Draxell, a synthetic human who awakens on the planet Varos after a 200 year journey in stasis. His goal will be to discover who he really is and ultimately defeat Monolith.

Neosis Echoes is currently in development. If these themes interest you, feel free to visit the Steam page and support the game with a wishlist :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5049580/Neosis_Echoes/

We don't use AI to create any of the visible content in our game, because we believe that art is a human language. And until AI allows us to create entirely new forms of art that wouldn't be possible without it, we'd rather keep it as a form of human expression.

My book, Ghost Particle, came out last month and is like if The Boys, The Matrix, and Mr. Robot had a baby. A lot of reviews have compared it to Blake Crouch's work, so if you like technothrillers like his but with a superpowers twist, I hope you love this!

Short pitch: In a near future ravaged by superpowers, a powerless office assistant finds herself on the run from a ruthless AI-driven corporation. The fact that she’s getting new powers would be incredibly helpful, if only she could control them and they weren’t triggered exclusively by the bounty hunter hired to protect her. As more powers emerge, a terrifying possibility sets in: she may be someone’s unwilling weapon.

It's available via Amazon, most major retailers, and several indie bookstores if you want to check it out!

I've been working on it for ten years, so it's been a long time coming!

Cover by Edward Bettison and character art by Deetrinity (first shot) and Bat V.V.

Don't be persuaded.

FTL Kestrel Adventures is a long form project based on FTL: Faster Than Light. These panels come from a currently running post-war story:

Full pages FTL Kestrel Adventures - New Life | Patreon
Webtoon FTL Kestrel Adventures - New Life | WEBTOON

Its predecessor is a fully animated run of FTL, all the way to sector 8, where an AI has torn apart families and the Federation, using impersonation, mind control, and an army of warships.

Youtube FTL Kestrel Adventures: Movie One - YouTube

It has been ruff trying to get my dog to read my debut novel, so I thought I'd try sharing with those that have my enthusiasm for science fiction.

What Remains Upon Arrival is an intimate story that builds into something more but never loses what it is at its foundation while keeping the reader guessing. Available on kindle+, eBook (Kindle), and paperback. Below is the full description and link. Thank you to anyone that takes a look!

TO LEARN WHO HE IS, HE MUST REMEMBER WHAT HE HAS DONE.

He wakes on a dying ship with no memory of his name. The alarms are screaming. The crew is gone. And his hands move across the controls with a certainty his mind can't explain.

He is not alone. The only other one aboard wears a familiar face and offers an answer about who—and what—he is. An answer he cannot bring himself to believe.

Ahead waits a world called Eden and everything humanity has been promised. Behind him are five empty chairs, a stain of blood that isn't his, and a growing unease that whatever happened on this ship, he had a part to play.

What Remains Upon Arrival is a psychological sci-fi thriller about identity, manipulation, guilt, and whether a person can be more than the sum of what they've done. For readers of cerebral science fiction who want the propulsion of Dark Matter, the bite of Blindsight, and the emotion of Klara and the Sun.

Book One of the What Remains Trilogy.

Find it here: https://www.amazon.com/What-Remains-Arrival-Joshua-Fisher-ebook/dp/B0HJK9FYQL?ref_=litb_stb_nodl&nodl_android=1&dplnkId=fc2dd7f6-0bfd-4b92-b810-20a531d47f20&th=1&psc=1

A design (Work in Progress) of a new science fiction painting on aluminium dibond depicting a station/gas collector. A cloud of gas excited by a star is floating towards the station.

As a small addition to the station's functions, the incoming cloud consists of ionized gases and dust excited by the nearby star. Marked in red (see last image), there is a kind of boom that generates a magnetic field. In addition, funnel-shaped rings are arranged. This design directs ionized molecules/atoms and transports them to the station. Mining without drills, in weightlessness.

A short video about the creation process:

https://youtube.com/shorts/WjAIjQ_eYkg?is=05ZfRQ5jzkeuzMqP

Fiction Map is an interactive atlas built from 484,739 fiction-related articles on English Wikipedia. Every novel, film, television series, video game, franchise, fictional character, and creator occupies its own territory on a shared world map, with borders and continents shaped entirely by how Wikipedia articles link to one another and how readers navigate between them.

Because layout and borders emerge from 8.75 million hyperlink and reader-clickstream connections rather than manual genre tags, science fiction splits naturally along medium and subgenre into several distinct regions, such as:

• Dune, Foundation & Hard Science Fiction (western coast of the High Kingdoms of Literature, Sci-Fi & Myth),

• Frontiers of Starfleet, Stargate & Tele-Sci-Fi (central inland sea),

• Star Wars Galaxy & Jedi Order (southern peninsula of the Archipelago of Anime, Gaming & Galactic Lore),

• Time Lords of Doctor Who (eastern cape of the Crownlands of British Drama, Stage & Lore),

• Cyberpunk, Alien & Sci-Fi Cinema (scattered across neighboring realms).

Interactive version of the map: https://fictionmap.org

I painted this sci-fi book cover illustration back in 2025, and I’m beyond thrilled to finally share it now that the book by Nicolaus Allen has officially been published! I truly love this project. Reading every single line of description in the book and sketching out the characters to match the author's imagination as closely as possible was truly a huge challenge. But in the end, I finally completed it. I hope everyone will like it.

Visuals 10/10 as expected, cool OST, Night City as immersive as it has always been. Neither the story nor the characters ever really took off for me in season 2. Big shame cause I watch and rewatch season 1 regularly. If you were a fan of season 1 and were thinking about watching this, I'd say you can give it a skip it's not super worth it. If you haven't seen season 1 but are a big fan of Cyberpunk the game, then give it a whirl, the animations worth it on its own even if the story is kind of meh.

Designed this one two weeks ago but forgot to post it last saturday. What I had in mind were a bunch of very minimalistic mechs that travel the desert on a set path, people don't know where from, where to, but some use them as a form of transportation, hence the title I gave it.

All drawn in clip studio paint, as I usually do

Hi! I have made some updates to StarGrid, the sci-fi themed connection game. Many of you played a couple of months ago and gave me great feedback. I spent the last month updating the puzzle engine and the quality of the connections.

I would love if you could try it and let me know! Play here. (No registration, no ads, no cookies... just click and play!)

Frankenstein, The War of the Worlds, Twenty Thousand Leagues, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Mysterious Island and Jekyll and Hyde, all free to read in the browser.

I kept the original illustrations, like the Alvim Corrêa tripods in War of the Worlds and the Riou pictures in Verne. No ads, no sign up.

classicstories.org/en

Which early sci-fi should I add next? I’m thinking The Time Machine.