In 1940, science fiction showed up in my life in a Flash Gordon movie serial. I moved on to the books and magazines a few years later as...

People die every night on the streets. This is clearly not quite the nation the Founding Fathers intended to create for us. And yes, I...

Cryptic and A Voice in the Night, the two Subterranean short fiction collections, still draw comments. A few readers have asked whether...

Black Lives Matter. It shouldn't come as a shock to us that all lives matter. Generally we define the primary principle of the...

The prime objective for an English teacher is not to teach reading, but to create a passion for it. Textbooks for English classes tend to...

When I was in high school I submitted a story to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I had high hopes, but it got rejected. The...

I recently finished Marie Benedict’s novel The Other Einstein, which delivered more surprises than anything else I’ve read. The person...

I had a twenty-year career in law enforcement with the Customs Service. As far as I could tell, Customs officers only made the headlines...

We can’t turn on the TV anymore without being subjected to leadership gone astray at the highest levels. I’ve been fortunate during my...

Despite attempts to reopen the country, we may be stuck for a long while in our present maintaining-space condition. One of the more...

The world is overwhelmed by the Coronavirus to a degree that no other topic is significant. I’m currently reading The Sun Also Rises and...

Our daughter Meredith passed away yesterday after a long struggle. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to be in pain at the end. We’re indebted...

My dad took me into center city Philadelphia to the Mastbaum Theater one evening in the mid-1940s to watch “Wonder Man,” a comedy...

Neil DeGrasse Tyson published Letters from an Astrophysicist last year. It’s a collection of questions and comments posed to Tyson by...

Mitt Romney made history last week. He is the only senator in U.S. history to vote against party lines to convict an impeached president....

I don’t think I’ve ever met a reader who hasn’t mentioned an inclination, or a flat-out determination to become a science fiction writer....

I just finished Charles Gannon’s Marque of Caine. It’s a wild ride through alternate universes and star systems controlled by a variety...

Christmas always arrives with intriguing gifts, jigsaw puzzles, communication devices, Eagles sweaters. Most interesting, usually, are...

People ask: “Where do you get your ideas for science fiction stories?” Harlan Ellison’s famous answer was ‘Sheboygan.’ I suspect, if...

Why You Say It, by Webb Garrison, is an intriguing collection of why certain phrases have taken hold in our language. For example, the...