Why has Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the elitist, eccentric, racist New England writer of that specialized brand of fear literature known as “cosmic horror,” lasted and prospered where other, better writers have been forgotten.

After all, Lovecraft was not the best of his era in any of the genres he wrote in. Clark Ashton Smith was a better stylist. Algernon Blackwood wrote better horror. Olaf Stapledon wrote better science fiction. Yet it is Lovecraft who has been canonized with a Library of America edition, who has provided the source material for academic writings, comic books, and even game shows like Jeopardy, and who has been assimilated by capitalist culture to the point that there are plushies made of his characters.

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Why? Because in addition to being one of the most critically acclaimed writers of science fiction, Card, or OSC, as he's dubbed in sci-fi circles, is also one of the most openly bigoted. Card is the great-great-grandson of Mormon icon Brigham Young, and his politics are deeply linked to his lifelong Mormonism. Card has been openly railing against what he calls "the homosexual agenda" for decades.

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Laura Miller recommends the memoir of Alexandra Aldrich, a descendent of the prominent Astor family, which provides a glimpse into a less privileged, less happy childhood than one would expect:

In premise alone, “The Astor Orphan” sounds like some delicious children’s novel, the kind of thing you’d gobble a dozen times over by the age of 8. In reality it’s a mournful, curious tale of an anxious child’s longing for security. Aldrich, who kept a diary from an early age, apparently sticks closely to it; her book has a halting, episodic rhythm. It lacks the fluency of truly accomplished storytelling, but the story it tells is so extraordinary, and Aldrich’s tone is so baldly honest, that the reader’s attention will not flag.

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In reality, however, animal experiments and human accidents have shown that people can likely survive exposure to vacuum conditions for at least a couple of minutes. Not that you would remain conscious long enough to rescue yourself, but if your predicament was accidental, there could be time for fellow crew members to rescue and repressurize you with few ill effects.

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Among the plethora of burger joints and clothing stores on 8th Street in the East Village, the Games Workshop hobby center sits inconspicuously on the ground floor of a residential building. Look past the colorful plastic figurines posed for battle in the glass display cases, past the game tables down the center of the store manned (yes, they’re all men) by players intently measuring their opponent’s next move. Way in the back is where the action is. This is where the hardcore gamers spend their days chatting about technique and preparing for battle. But they’re not clutching controllers or mesmerized by a glaring screen. They are holding paintbrushes — one of the essential weapons of Warhammer.

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But what most people don't know is that he was also in fandom. Ebert began his career as a teenager in sci-fi fandom, writing passionate letters to fanzines and eventually writing for the fanzines himself.

But he didn't just write. In a missive for sci-fi magazine Asimov's, published in 2004, Ebert recalls how "Fandom was a secret society and I had admission to friends everywhere who spoke the same arcane language."

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Also solved: the economy. No one has to worry about making a living in the Culture. If one wanted, like Banks, to spend one's time producing (at a prodigious rate) science fiction romps (as Iain M. Banks) and straight-ahead non-sf novels (as Iain Banks), one could do so as long as one wished, without ever having to worry about whether there was a market for them.

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The Pulitzer-prize winning historian David Hackett Fischer wrote that “in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion’s seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been.” He was referring to our political, social, and linguistic patterns, but it may be the arts and entertainment where the patrimony and connections are strongest. School curricula invariably include Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare. The first American movie star was London-born Charlie Chaplin. Harry Potter is the fastest selling book series in US history, even though the boarding school culture on which Hogwarts is based is practically nonexistent here and some of the jokes (“spellotape” is a play on “sellotape,” the British name for Scotch tape) don’t translate. In 1965, half of Billboard’s number-one songs were by British bands. An Englishman won an Oscar for the role of Abraham Lincoln.

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I have an almost infinite number of books that I recommend people to read at one point or another, but Ender’s Game is on that very short list of novels that I feel is truly universal. Every aspect of the novel revolves around a nuanced exploration of what empathy really is and why it matters. From Peter’s use of empathy as a weapon, to Valentine’s uncontrollable sympathy for those around her, to Ender’s devastating tension between the two. This is a novel for those who think and feel too deeply.

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For those unfamiliar with the show, Booker described it in The Guardian as a modern-day version of "The Twilight Zone." It tackles the dissonance between the routine things we do, like tweet and talk to smartphones, and the fact "that just five years ago would scarcely have made sense to us." Booker expounded:

This area – between delight and discomfort – is where Black Mirror, my new drama series, is set. The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone. The series was inspired, indirectly, by The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling's hugely entertaining TV series of the late 50s and early 60s, sometimes incorrectly dismissed as a camp exercise in twist-in-the-tale sci-fi. It was far more than that. Serling, a brilliant writer, created The Twilight Zone because he was tired of having his provocative teleplays about contemporary issues routinely censored in order to appease corporate sponsors. If he wrote about racism in a southern town, he had to fight the network over every line. But if he wrote about racism in a metaphorical, quasi-fictional world – suddenly he could say everything he wanted.

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That's what science-fiction writer John Scalzi has done -- and in the process, he's raised more than $50,000 in pledges for Emily's List and the Human Rights Campaign, specially chosen to earn the ire of a blogger Scalzi calls "my racist sexist homophobic dipshit."

Every time Scalzi's online nemesis -- a former WorldNetDaily columnist who writes under the name Vox Day -- used his name or called someone by a derogatory nickname, Scalzi set aside $5 for charity -- and his readers pitched in, too, raising tens of thousands for charities designed to uplift women, minorities and gays. Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network and the NAACP also benefit; Scalzi capped his own donation at $1,000 and his readers took over from there.

"The whole point of this is not to intimidate him to stop speaking. You will not get this guy to stop speaking. He sees this as a contest, as a battle of wills," said Scalzi, in an interview with Salon. Giving money to charities like RAINN and the NAACP is, he says, "an extra stab in the eye."

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The news comes as a surprise, especially since Abrams was one of the first directors to announce he would pass on the role -- and because he already has an allegiance to rival nerd franchise, "Star Trek." He told Empire Magazine:

“There were the very early conversations and I quickly said that because of my loyalty to ‘Star Trek’, and also just being a [‘Star Wars’] fan, I wouldn’t even want to be involved in the next version of those things.”

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“There were the very early conversations and I quickly said that because of my loyalty to ‘Star Trek’, and also just being a [‘Star Wars’] fan, I wouldn’t even want to be involved in the next version of those things.”

Abrams is sticking to the "Star Trek" franchise, it seems -- Vulture reports that he's committed to another "Star Trek" movie after the upcoming 2013 film.

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Why? Odds are that your imagination will be adding things to the present world. I am sorry, but this approach is exactly backward: the way to do it rigorously is to take away from the future, reduce from it, simply, things that do not belong to the coming times.

I am not saying that new technologies will not emerge — something new will rule its day, for a while. What is currently fragile will be replaced by something else, of course. But this “something else” is unpredictable. In all likelihood, the technologies you have in your mind are not the ones that will make it, no matter your perception of their fitness and applicability — with all due respect to your imagination.

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