Science Fiction

Philip K. DICK, the science-fiction author who struggled for years with personal demons, never saw "Blade Runner," the first Hollywood adaptation of his writing. He died of a stroke just four months shy of its release in 1982. His grieving daughter Isa, then 15, remembers going to see the film in a San Rafael theater hoping that it might, somehow, keep part of her father alive.

Twenty-three years have passed since Orson Scott Card first dazzled readers with "Ender's Game," a seminal work that blurred the lines between young adult and adult fiction. Now he's back with "Ender in Exile," which picks up where the 1985 winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, science fiction's highest honors, left off.

Virginia Heinlein, who gave her husband, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, the idea for his acclaimed 1961 novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" and inspired many of the strong female characters in his stories, died Jan. 18 at a retirement community in Atlantic Beach, Fla. She was 86. Heinlein died in her sleep after a long struggle with respiratory illness and a broken hip suffered on Thanksgiving, said David M. Silver, secretary-treasurer of the Heinlein Society.

Right about then, the Age of Aquarius seemed to be reaching an apocalyptic conclusion: Amid campus riots, a contentious war and political assassinations, it was hard not to feel fatalistic. And Robert Silverberg, a New York writer who'd recently watched his home burn to the ground and now felt his marriage turning to ash as well, sat down to write one of the darkest books in American literature, as well as one of the most unjustly overlooked. The reasons "Dying Inside," published in 1972, is not as well known as "Portnoy's Complaint" or "Rabbit, Run" are complex.

Octavia E. Butler's first creation in the world of science fiction was herself. Before anybody told her that black girls do not grow up to write about futuristic worlds, Butler, the daughter of a shoeshine man and a maid, was already fashioning a place for herself in a white-dominated universe.

Junot Díaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" seems poised to be the hottest debut novel of the year. Arriving after 11 years of expectation following Díaz's celebrated story collection "Drown," the novel's narrative voice evokes both the polyglot energy of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and the sexual longing (and New Jersey setting) of Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint." But in some crucial ways Oscar, the novel's hapless protagonist, is the opposite of the horn dog Portnoy.

The science-fiction section of any good bookstore gives me the feeling of starving in the midst of plenty. The shelves are full to overflowing with arresting covers and provocative titles, yet the finding of a good new writer or book is a rare event. Reliable guidance to quality science fiction is needed, and David Pringle, editor of the British science fiction magazine Interzone, has written a book that should help.

Was author Philip K. Dick a brilliant, mystical visionary whose time has finally come? Or was he a justly ignored madman whose paranoid fantasies filled an endless series of lumpily written science-fiction novels? Nine years after his death from a stroke at age 53, the American reading public will finally have a chance to find out.

FOR the German monk searching for signs of God in "Star Trek," the obscure storeroom on the fourth floor of UC Riverside's main library was worth the trans-Atlantic pilgrimage. Bernhard Janzen pored over television scripts and a video clip from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," and noticed how an African American space station captain had found a religious stone tablet and, much like Moses, smashed it on the ground as he shepherded an oppressed people toward freedom.

Andre Norton, a prolific author best known for her science fiction and fantasy novels, including the popular "Witch World" series, has died. She was 93. Norton, who earned a reputation as the grande dame of science fiction and fantasy, died Thursday of congestive heart failure at her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Right about then, the Age of Aquarius seemed to be reaching an apocalyptic conclusion: Amid campus riots, a contentious war and political assassinations, it was hard not to feel fatalistic. And Robert Silverberg, a New York writer who'd recently watched his home burn to the ground and now felt his marriage turning to ash as well, sat down to write one of the darkest books in American literature, as well as one of the most unjustly overlooked. The reasons "Dying Inside," published in 1972, is not as well known as "Portnoy's Complaint" or "Rabbit, Run" are complex.

J.G. Ballard, one of the most inventive of the new wave of British science fiction writers to emerge in the 1960s who was best known for the autobiographical novel "Empire of the Sun," died Sunday, his agent said. He was 78. He had been ill "for several years" and died in London at the home of his long-term partner, his agent, Margaret Hanbury, said. She did not give the cause of death. Ballard was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006.

If J.G. Ballard -- the visionary British novelist who died Sunday of prostate cancer at age 78 -- ends up being remembered, it will likely be as a science fiction writer who aspired to use genre as a vehicle for art. That's true enough, in a certain small-bore manner, but it's ultimately reductive, a way of categorizing Ballard that his entire career stood against. A member of the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s, Ballard started out writing proto-environmental thrillers that highlighted the prescience of his imagination: "The Wind From Nowhere" posits a world-wide windstorm that becomes apocalyptic, while "The Drowned World" is about a planet swamped by risen seas.

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.

Twenty-three years have passed since Orson Scott Card first dazzled readers with "Ender's Game," a seminal work that blurred the lines between young adult and adult fiction. Now he's back with "Ender in Exile," which picks up where the 1985 winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, science fiction's highest honors, left off.

In December 1977, all I really wanted for Christmas was a lightsaber, just like the ones the Jedi Knights used in "Star Wars." I did find one waiting for me under the tinsel-covered tree that year, but, sadly, instead of being a fearsome weapon, it was a black flashlight with a flimsy plastic tube stuck on top. The disappointment, even for an 8-year-old, was a bitter one. I'm guessing that the person who spent $240,000 at a Calabasas Hills auction last...

Leave it to George Lucas to dictate style in space. On the first day of filming "Star Wars" -- as Carrie Fisher writes in her new book, "Wishful Drinking" -- the director told her that she couldn't wear a bra under her white Princess Leia dress because it would strangle her in zero gravity. Hmmm. No doubt, a little jiggle didn't hurt in a galaxy far, far away, either. In fact, it would seem that undergarments have no place in most science fiction movies.

Hollywood has already dipped into its sci-fi vault for 21st century remakes of "The War of the Worlds," "Planet of the Apes" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still," so what's next on the revival list? Plenty.

Today in the United States and most of Western Europe, a majority of people say they believe their children's lives will be worse than theirs. According to the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project survey, this stunning lack of optimism ranges from 80% in France to about 70% in Italy and Germany to 60% in the U.S. and Britain.

Robert H. Justman, a producer who was one of the creative forces behind the original "Star Trek" television series of the 1960s as well as the 1980s-era "Star Trek: The Next Generation," has died. He was 81. Justman died Wednesday at his Los Angeles home of complications from Parkinson's disease, his son Jonathan said. Justman's death came within days of those of his "Star Trek" friends and colleagues Joseph Pevney, who directed some of the original series' most popular episodes, and Alexander "Sandy" Courage, who composed the series theme.