Science Fiction

Ray Bradbury belonged to Los Angeles. Like many with a similar tie to this city, he came from somewhere else - Waukegan, Ill. - but it was really after his family moved to California in 1934 that he came into his own. Bradbury developed as a writer here, partly because of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, a phenomenal group that counted among its members Robert Heinlein and Forrest J. Ackerman and met at Clifton's Cafeteria downtown....

Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion animation pioneer who became a cult figure for creating special effects for “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” “Jason and the Argonauts” and other science fiction and fantasy film classics, died Tuesday in London of natural causes. He was 92. His death was confirmed by Kenneth Kleinberg, his longtime legal representative in the United States. Harryhausen, a Los Angeles native who lived in London for more than four decades, inspired generations of filmmakers and special-effects artists.

Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story: Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back. Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick. As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me: "Everything in the Philip K. Dick world is complicated.

In the new sci-fi movie "Oblivion," Earth's most precious resource is Tom Cruise. But running a close second (spoiler alert) is water. Aliens want it. All of it. This is old hat, science fiction-wise. In "The War of the Worlds," H.G. Wells had Martians coming to Earth to quench their thirst. The extraterrestrial lizards (cleverly disguised as human catalog models) in the 1980s TV series "V" came here to steal our water too - though they wanted it in part to wash down the meal they intended to make of us. In the more recent "Battle: Los Angeles," pillaging Earth's oceans was the only motivation we're given for why aliens were laying waste to humanity.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ROBERT SILVERBERG Volume 1: Secret Sharers by Robert Silverberg (Bantam Books: $25 cloth, $12.50 paper; 546 pp. ) Bob Silverberg has been a very busy man for a long time now, his prolificacy often obscuring the fact that he has all along, while cranking out porno novels, children's books and a variety of potboilers, also produced some of the most engaging, original science fiction being written.

Nalo Hopkinson is trying to mess with your mind. The much-lauded writer of science fiction and fantasy sits at one of her favorite Mexican joints, Tio's Tacos, a funky art-strewn restaurant near the campus of UC Riverside, where she has taught creative writing since 2011. Diminutive and bespectacled, she speaks gently and laughs generously as the conversation roams through favorite writers (Samuel R. Delany, Tobias S. Bucknell, Charles Saunders) and the historical consciousness in her work (writing is "a combination of excavation and imagination")

Philip Jose Farmer was working for a steel and wire company in Peoria, Ill., and writing part time in 1952 when he stirred up the science-fiction world with his first published sci-fi tale, a controversial novella that appeared in the magazine Startling Stories. "The Lovers," a story in which a male earthling has a sexual relationship with an alien female, broke the taboo against depicting sex in the genre.

If you love inventive storytelling but you're not a fan of the George R.R. Martin school of fantasy, worry not. Publishers are offering some of the best new books in fantasy's cousin genre, science fiction, for your reading pleasure during the summer: Railsea A Novel China Miéville Ballantine: 431 pp., $18 The last time China Miéville ("Embassytown," "Kraken") ventured into YA territory, it was to give readers a vision of England's capital and of its strange mirror-image, a place described by that book's title as "Un Lun Dun. " Now, in his latest, "Railsea," a book ostensibly for the YA crowd but billed by the publisher as a novel for all ages, Miéville gives us another strange mirror-image: This time, it's his variation on that classic American novel "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville (and "Miéville" is just a keypad slip away from typing "Melville")

In his fervid imagination, Ray Bradbury roamed across time and space. But as a longtime Angeleno, he was deeply rooted in the otherworldly landscapes and swiftly evolving human topography of his adopted home of Southern California. Not only did Los Angeles, where Bradbury lived for decades, help shape his fantasy andsci-fiwritings. The author also was known across the city as a beloved and familiar figure: supportive of the local literary and theater communities, a regular at bookstore readings and speaking engagements, a haunter of libraries and bookshops, and an enthusiastic promoter of the culture of reading.

Nalo Hopkinson is trying to mess with your mind. The much-lauded writer of science fiction and fantasy sits at one of her favorite Mexican joints, Tio's Tacos, a funky art-strewn restaurant near the campus of UC Riverside, where she has taught creative writing since 2011. Diminutive and bespectacled, she speaks gently and laughs generously as the conversation roams through favorite writers (Samuel R. Delany, Tobias S. Bucknell, Charles Saunders) and the historical consciousness in her work (writing is "a combination of excavation and imagination")

'Beyond the Infinite: Science Fiction After Kubrick' Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theater When: Friday through April 6; Friday: "Phase IV" at 7:30 p.m.; "Silent Running" at 9:10 p.m. Tickets: $5-$10 Information: lacma.org/programs/film/series-and-special-screenings

One night on Mt. Wilson about 1908, a short, powerfully built man with a handlebar mustache looked through the largest telescope in the world. What he saw transformed him, and would put Los Angeles at the forefront of a movement to make astronomy the people's science. We may never know whether Col. Griffith J. Griffith saw the rings of Saturn or another celestial object with the then-new 60-inch reflector telescope, but we can be sure that it inspired his vision of a world-class observatory for the people of Los Angeles, allowing the masses a glimpse of the heavens.

The strangest part of this story may be that in the middle of World War II, 74-year-old British author H.G. Wells took a train to Texas to speak to a meeting of the United States Brewers Assn. I can't quite figure out why he was tapped to speak there; perhaps he simply liked beer. By 1940, Wells had published almost all of his fiction, his fantastical works helped shape science fiction that would come later. Some of his most lasting works, all written before 1900, include "The Time Machine," "The Island of Doctor Moreau," "The Invisible Man" and "The War of the Worlds.

BlackBerry's relaunch includes one new bookish wrinkle: It's doing a year-long project with writer Neil Gaiman. The collaborative project will be written in monthly installments by Gaiman, using ideas and inspiration from readers inspired to join in. In BlackBerry's video (below) promoting the project, which it's calling "A Calendar of Tales," Gaiman tromps around in the snow, reads at a bookstore and, of course, taps away at a new BlackBerry. Gaiman doesn't say anything particularly unusual in the video.

Reader P.J. Gendell of Beverly Hills, in a letter published Thursday posed a question to journalist and climate-change activist Bill McKibben in response to his Jan. 6 Op-Ed article, "Climate change won't wait": "McKibben is very adamant that 'if we're to slow the pace of climate change, we need to cut emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5% a year.' Considering what a huge amount that is, it would be helpful for...

The intersection of 5th and Flower streets in downtown Los Angeles was designated Ray Bradbury Square by city officials Thursday. But a better description might be "the intersection of imagination and inspiration," author and producer Steven Paul Leiva told fans of the noted writer who died in June at age 91. The location, near the front entrance to the Central Library, is a fitting place to honor the author of "The Illustrated Man" and "The...

Few authors manage to shuffle off this mortal coil just as their final, finished work hits bookstores. Heirs are understandably tempted to let those incomplete works come to light -- with varying degrees of success. Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden" Begun in 1946, it was published in 1986, 25 years after Hemingway's suicide. Two thirds of Hemingway's unwieldy manuscript was excised. E.L. Doctorow lamented, "this cannot have been the book Hemingway envisioned. " Generally awful, it is remembered mostly for its explicit threesome scenes.