Allan Dyen-Shapiro

For fifteen years, from my submitting applications to fund my postdoc through my first faculty position, through political change leading...

The public phase of the Congressional hearings on the January 6th insurrection began yesterday. I saw a few clips and had to look away,...

I'm midway through reading a book whose publication date I noted on social media the day it was announced. I never do that. Even with...

I finally got around to reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. They had been hanging out on my Kindle...

Hey, Joe. Allan here. Not one of your constituents, but we've got many West Virginia transplants living near me in Florida. I met one the...

Melvin Van Peebles' obituaries finally prompted me to watch the classic movie that started Black independent cinema in the 1970s, Sweet...

I am writing this during the "lunch break" on the last day of FIYAHCON. Reading my own story at the virtual "tea house" last night was a...

Karbon allows the user's body to function in autopilot mode, performing all the routine tasks expected of them while leaving the person...

In Margaret Atwood's dystopian science fiction novel Oryx and Crake, in a moment meant to spark revulsion, the protagonist chows down on...

I recently had the opportunity to freeload at ICFA (International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts). By freeloading, I mean...

"This is what America sounds like." I heard the line last weekend at a dinner theater that found a way to open near my home. All the...

It's dropped off the headlines, but I would still maintain that the central fault line in US politics is over abortion. With the climate...

David was my favorite character from the Canadian-migrated-to-Netflix science-fiction TV show Travelers. He begins the show as Marcy's...

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial recently, criticizing the new First Lady for continuing to go by Dr. Jill Biden rather...

The analysts bemoan their epiphany that half of America was willing to vote for a man with fascist leanings. In their eyes, voting for a...

Although the pandemic has been awful in many ways and killed far too many—and I would never dare to minimize this tragedy—it has led to...

I didn't start reading science fiction until I was in my late thirties. Sure, I'd encountered some of the classics in high school English...

Identity—it's who you are—partially born into, partly chosen, and in part forced upon you. It was the subject of two different stories I...

"Kung flu," "the Chinese virus," "enormous evidence" that the coronavirus outbreak originated in a Chinese biotech lab—these phrases used...

Like many of you who have been sheltering-in-place, with my now-virtual day job having settled down a bit, I've been catching up on TV...