Looking at cloth and clothing in science fictional textiles.

Looking at stories of population manipulation and the statistical predictability of people.

For the Homo Superior

Exploring the portrayals and predictions of reality shows in science fiction

A recurring aspiration in visions of the future is the idea that machines, and particularly robots, will come to dominate key aspects of our lives and societies.

Exploring space weather - an important problem both in science fiction and in our contemporary world.

One of the common uses of science fiction is to imagine the habitability of worlds very different from our own. Some famous science fiction narratives consider a desert as their setting, but how is human habitability envisaged in these worlds and how plausible are they?

The ability to control the weather has been one of the goals of science for decades - with limited success - and, inevitably, science fiction has explored its possibilities and possible consequences.

In the science fiction of the 1940s, 50s and 60s atomic power is ubiquitous, to the extent that it permeates domestic as well as industrial and military settings. But just how common is this atomic future in science fiction, and what can we learn from its rise and fall?

The threat to space travel presented by space junk - the debris left behind by earlier human activity - has long been recognised. Naturally, science fiction has not failed to explore both the threat and the potential dangers of ignoring it.

Exploring a 1950s short story and radio play which itself critiques the relationship between science and science fiction

Human settlement of space has been a given since the earliest science fiction stories were written. The High Frontier was an influential popular science book published in 1976 by an American physicist Gerard K O’Neill. The High Frontier had an enormous impact, and cylindrical space habitats have since acquired the name O’Neill Cylinders, both in fact and in fiction.

One of the most evocative of human senses is our sense of smell. It is closely connected with memory recall, with the taste of food, and with the more “primitive” and instinctual regions of our hindbrains. Science fiction has explored odour - and in particular an oversensitivity to odours - in a number of ways.

Most science fiction tells fundamentally human stories, on human timescales. However sometimes science fiction authors venture into the longer timescales on which cosmic evolution itself unfolds.

A bonus blog to celebrate a year of Cosmic Stories, detouring from science exploration to a brief survey of our host town in science fiction.

If the laws of mathematics and science are the same everywhere in the Universe, then these might provide a key common ground for communication - as science fiction has explored.

The visual imagery of humans struggling with everyday objects many times their own size, or encountering usually benign animals as terrifying monsters, captures the imagination. Hence the popularity of the SF of miniaturisation.

Is it possible for individuals to own entire planets? Science fiction has explored this question more than once, in a range of different contexts.

A common theme in science fiction is to consider the possibility of teleportation - the ability to move instantaneously between two locations, whether through natural mental abilities or mechanical means

Looking at science fiction which considers rule by science in a variety of forms.

One of the key functions of science fiction is to explore both the potentialities and the risks of technologies, particularly those which are new or to which we aspire. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, automation has been a preoccupation of SF almost since it began.

The quest for highly extended or eternal life, in the form of longevity treatments, technological solutions or genetic improvement, has been a staple of science fiction almost since it started

The Avengers was a television series that defies classification. Here I look at its SF elements and what they tell us about science in the 1960s.