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Uncanny Magazine would like to thank the following people for supporting us on Patreon. This magazine would not be possible without their support. Space Unicorn Ranger Corps RECRUITS a pair of enchanted gloves, Aleksi Stenberg, Alice Wood, Amit Gupta, Andrew S. Fuller, Annaliese Lemmon, Bouncy Paw, Brad Munson, Bradley Z Haumont, Brian Liberge, Catharine […]
In his paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing considers a simple question: “Can machines think?”1 However, Turing begins his actual answer not with machines, but with something called “The Imitation Game.” It is basically a texting game in which two players, a man and a woman, chat with a third “interrogator” of unspecified gender. […]
One of the joys of Doctor Who is when decades after first broadcast, a story’s themes are suddenly painfully relevant again, and you can marvel at the timelessness of the world’s greatest Science Fiction television series. An even greater joy is when a story over half a century old suddenly acquires a whole new thematic […]
The year 2025 saw three major superhero movie releases. Two from Marvel—Thunderbolts/New Avengers and The Fantastic 4: First Steps—and one from DC Comics, the long-awaited Superman reboot. The last time Superman had his own solo film, I was sorely disappointed. Broad swathes of the audience were put off by the 9/11-style destruction visited on Metropolis, […]
Content note: This essay has bugs in it. And lizards, and snakes, and other creeping, crawling things. I can’t help it, because these days I find myself thinking a lot about these little interlopers, and monsters, and immortality, and what is a long life, and in contrast what is a short life, and what […]
Uncanny Magazine would like to thank the following people for supporting us on Patreon. This magazine would not be possible without their support. Space Unicorn Ranger Corps RECRUITS a pair of enchanted gloves, Ai Lake, Aleksi Stenberg, Alice Wood, Amit Gupta, Andrew S. Fuller, Annaliese Lemmon, Bouncy Paw, Brad Munson, Bradley Z Haumont, Brian […]
Regarding his landmark 1961 novel Solaris, Stanisław Lem stated multiple times that his goal was to depict the impossibility of human contact with a truly alien intelligence. He created a planet with a sentient ocean, and after humans in an orbiting space station bombard it with radiation, it responds by raiding their subconsciouses and sending […]
In the twenty-second episode of the second season of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, “The Wire” (which is a holy text), we learn of the existence of a genre of Cardassian literature called “the repetitive epic.” The text under discussion, in this particular meeting of Garak and Bashir’s Lunch Time Flirting Book Club, is called […]
I occasionally write short stories, but mostly I write scripts for TV shows. Many of these shows fit neatly under the Science Fiction and Fantasy umbrellae, and many others do not. But, lucky for me, good dialogue doesn’t change depending on genre. To paraphrase and turn around what James Kirk famously observed, he works in […]
I had always believed that I understood what it meant to be immortal, what immortality is, but with each new introduction to immortality through fiction, through films, through the ideas of those around me, more and more I’ve come to question what does it really mean to be immortal? One thing it seems humans fear […]
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