Enjoy my newest short story in Clarkesworld Magazine issue 195!
Science Fiction
Fiction for November”Wild Dream Country” & “Look at the Birds”
two new stories for November! Read "Wild Dream Country" & "Look at the Birds"
Prepare for a visitor: Novella landing!
The Visitation Seeds have come! A new novella coming from me to you
Human Expansions: Literary Worlds of Distributed Cognition
Please enjoy my presentation on "Literary Worlds of Distributed Cognition" on YouTube!
Toronto SFF Panel and Boochani Interview
Check out two cool but very different events coming in the next few weeks!
What We See in the Smoke
The world we know is coming to an end. How will we connect in the strange and frightening one that's coming to take its place? What We See in the Smoke twists the genres of realism and science fiction to tell the future history of Toronto, a story that stretches from this millennium to the next. … Continue reading What We See in the Smoke
“Cat’s Cradle: The Sin of Scientists and Systems” by Ben Berman Ghan
Science Fiction (SF) is a genre often used to explore how scientists and science are a source of evil, potentially leading to the demise of civilization. Works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) have well established the trope of the mad scientist who focuses on unnatural or evil experiments. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s … Continue reading “Cat’s Cradle: The Sin of Scientists and Systems” by Ben Berman Ghan
I’m Back! Upcoming Book announcement: What We See in the Smoke
Hello, world. Is this thing on? It has been almost an entire year since I last wrote a single blog post. I've been keeping things very tight-lipped, close to the chest. My thinking was that I should not discuss any ongoing projects that I wasn't sure the world was going to see. So I vanished … Continue reading I’m Back! Upcoming Book announcement: What We See in the Smoke
Arrival – A Case of Déjà vu
Walking into Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer, I only knew a little about the movie. I knew that it was based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by author Ted Chiang which I have not read (it’s on the shelf). I knew that it was starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. I was pleasantly surprised to see Forest Whitaker around the ten minute mark. I knew this was going to be a movie about first contact with aliens. And yet as the movie began, I couldn’t help but feel I’d seen this all before. I mean that as the highest of praise, incidentally.
Twelve alien space ships land on Earth. Nobody knows why. Professor of linguistics “Louise Banks” (Amy Adams) is recruited by the US government and sent to the alien arrival sight in Montana, where she is partnered with “Ian…
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Ex_Machina – I am become Death
Somewhere in the wilderness of Alaska there is a house, and inside that house are four people. At least one of these people is not human, but a robot. Over the course of a single week, the occupants must determine if this robot is a living, thinking thing, or just an illusion of consciousness.
This is the barest plot description possible of Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina, a film with an incredibly tight cast including only four actors (only three of whom have speaking roles) who appear in only a single setting throughout the film. The film is not only entertaining, tense, intelligent, and beautifully shot, but it might also just be the best philosophical movie about robots since Blade Runner.
In the not so distant future, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is an employee of Bluebook, the biggest and most powerful internet search engine in the world. When Caleb wins a…
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Ben Berman Ghan 