Word: sci-fi
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Writing while bringing up children, Le Guin sold her first short story when she was 30 and then began building a stellar reputation among sci-fi fans; her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness won both a Hugo and a Nebula, science fiction's most prestigious awards. The Farthest Shore (1972) received a National Book Award. As the youngsters went off to school, the author fell into a writing schedule that she still maintains. She goes to her writing room in the house each morning at 9 and sits there for at least four hours, whether ideas...
Like leftover props from a sci-fi thriller movie, strange apparitions are appearing across the U.S. In the deserts of New Mexico, huge banks of motorized mirrors track the sun and focus its rays into a cyclops-like eye of red heat. A mountain in North Carolina has been crowned with what appears to be a giant aircraft propeller. A large man-made atoll, resembling a top that Gulliver would have spun for the Lilliputians, may soon be floating off the coast of California. All are imaginative, experimental devices to help find and develop alternative energies, which would alleviate...
Alien may prove to be Hollywood's most efficient moneymaking machine of the summer. Technically slick and commercially singleminded, this film attempts to crossbreed the scare tactics of Jaws with the sci-fi hardware of Star Wars. The result is a cinematic bastard, and a pretty mean bastard at that. Alien contains a couple of genuine jolts, a barrage of convincing special effects and enough gore to gross out children of all ages. What is missing is wit, imagination and the vaguest hint of human feeling. Luckily for Alien's creators, such ingredients are not really essential...
Both are remarkable works. Opus 200 is a cornucopia: for sci-fi buffs there are excerpts from the 1972 novel The Gods Themselves and the award-winning robot story The Bicentennial Man. For those who prefer Asimov's other talents, there are such tours de force as an introduction to binary numbers; an explanation, in language that even Dick and Jane can follow, of why it is possible (but not practical) to reverse the basic nuclear reaction and convert energy into matter; some witty Asimovian annotations on Shakespeare, the Bible and the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and Lord Byron...
...Seth Low Junior College at age 15, helped pay for his college and graduate school with fiction that sold for a penny a word. At a time when many young men were looking for their first postcollege jobs, Asimov published what became one of the most anthologized sci-fi stories in history, Nightfall, a speculation about how man would view the stars if they appeared only once every thousand years...