Mars Needs Babies is my response to the challenge of writing a future shaped by Elon Musk. If you’d like a new piece of short fiction delivered to your email every month, please subscribe to my newsletter. Gwynne concentrates on breathing gently as she secures the suit seals. They’ve never been worn in and you can’t […]
On October 13th 2024, SpaceX caught a 20-storey booster rocket returning from the edge of space. An hour later, they accurately mock-landed the second-stage spaceship in the Indian Ocean. This was only the fifth test flight of a Starship combo. Spaceflight has long ago passed the Wright Brothers stage of innovation — this is more […]
Last week the sky came out to play, and I crossed off a bucket list item that had begun to feel like a cosmic joke. Now I can say that I have seen an aurora from my front door. In the Noughties, I went to Iceland and Scandinavia in the hope of seeing the Northern […]
Partial gravity — anything that’s not the same as Earth — used to be a special effects expense that no-one wanted. It’s 2024, we have cheap SFX, so why does everywhere in space still look like it’s either zero-g or on Earth? After all, there’s just one place in the universe — our home — […]
If you want to publish or submit AI-generated writing, you need to know this: you don’t own that work. No one knows who owns that work. You had an idea and created the prompt that lead to the work, but in the world of intellectual property, ideas are worth nothing. Expression is everything. That’s why […]
If you’re going to use AI for writing or research, you need to know two things. The first is that AI doesn’t know anything. There are other important things to know about AI. It’s trained on content taken without permission of the creators. It contributes to rising greenhouse emissions and power consumption from technology companies. […]
Most writers hate writing a synopsis, so it seems like the perfect challenge for an AI. What I discovered reveals a lot about the current state and limitations of generative AIs like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The current wave of interest in AI is fascinating because it inspires so much hype on both sides. I […]
Animals in space don’t have a happy history, but more than half of humans share their lives with an animal companion. Space pets will be a thing, even if they’re rarely found in science fiction. Laika and her doomed Soviet space dog chums, the NASA chimps, and the countless small animals sent to experience things […]
The zero-g fryer is bubbling, the smell of fresh bread fills your spacecraft and a bell chimes the shift change. The crew gathers in the ship’s mess. We’ve gone from growing food and making meat to off-Earth cooking, so what will meal times look like in space? The first question is when to eat. In […]
The gravity’s turned down low, the larder is packed with space-grown veggies, cultured meat and artificial protein: it’s time to get cooking in space. Astro-chefs have to improvise hard right now, but there are tools on the way which will revolutionise the way space travellers feed themselves. I fell into a research vortex when I […]