Reprint: Transhumanity

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Arthur C Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Charles Darwin, Christopher Evans, Frederik Pohl, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, Jack Finney, James Tiptree Jr, John W. Campbell, Martin Caidin, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Silverberg, S Fowler Wright, T.H. Huxley

We’re getting close to the end of the series of Cognitive Mapping columns I wrote for Vector. This one first appeared in Vector 194, July-August 1997.

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Reprint: Exogamy

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Alex Raymond, Arthur C Clarke, Claude Veillot, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edmond Hamilton, Gardner Dozois, George T. Chesney, Gregory Benford, Gwyneth Jones, H. Beam Piper, H.G. Wells, Harry Turtledove, Ian McDonald, Jack Finney, Jack Williamson, John Clute, John Collier, Octavia Butler, Peter Hoeg, Philip Francis Nowlan, Roger Zelazny, Thomas M. Disch

This column from my Cognitive Mapping series, which first appeared in Vector 202, November-December 1998, might well be seen as a companion to the column on Aliens, looking at another aspect of our enduring fascination with the other.

Reprint: Aliens

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Andrew M. Butler, Arthur C Clarke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Frederik Pohl, Gwyneth Jones, H.G. Wells, Jack Finney, John Wyndham, Keith Roberts, Olaf Stapledon, S Fowler Wright, Vernor Vinge

Back in 1995 (good heavens!) I began a series of columns for Vector in which I would explore various standard tropes of science fiction. The series lasted until 2001, with an extra piece added in 2005. Not a bad run. They all had pretty much the same format: a couple of illustrative quotations, then a very broad historical survey of the trope leading back to the works from which my opening quotes had been taken (it was based on a series by David Lodge that had been running in the Guardian at that time. Andrew Butler gave me a title for the series, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, and this was one of the earliest of them. It first appeared in Vector 188, August 1996.