Imaginary Worlds

The gold metal bikini that Princess Leia wears in Return of the Jedi has become the dominant image of her from action figures to Cosplay....

The epic battle between the Evil Empire and the Rebel Alliance has become a metaphor we love to use in sports and politics. But what...

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic...

In this bonus episode of Imaginary Worlds, I look at how Back to the Future Part II might have been a better movie if it took place in our...

They arrive out of nowhere in shockingly large ships, brandishing weapons we've never seen, offering false promises of peace when they...

FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are reopening The X-Files in January. And the Internet couldn't be more excited. Every casting...

I spent the last two months learning how to play Dungeons & Dragons. That's right, I never played as a kid. But I've been reading so many...

"The Strong Female Character" sounds positive, but it's actually a term used by culture critics to describe the token girl let into the...

Superhero costumes used to be stand alone works of fashion that over time became dated or cringe-worthy. But lately, movie and TV superhero...

I have a thing for doppelgangers. Partly it's because my brain always falls for this trick and believes on some level that the doubles are...

New York City real estate is not usually a hotbed of fantasy, except the fantasy that you could afford that $20 million condo 50 stories...

At the height of his career, Richard Williams was hailed as the next Walt Disney -- and he won two visual effects Oscars for Roger Rabbit....

Ronald D. Moore is best known for rebooting Battlestar Galactica for the post-9/11 era, but he got his start writing on Star Trek: The Next...

A few years ago, I reported a story about a safe house program for vampires in New Haven, CT. The city supplied the vampires with blood if...

Ed Skoudis built a different kind of imaginary world. It's a three-dimensional model of a town that the military uses for cyber war games....

Game of Thrones is huge in every way. Why does this medieval fantasy with knights and castles speak to our time? Politics. There are a...

Zombies. I hate them the way Indiana Jones hates snakes. I know it's a ridiculous phobia -- they're not real, and zombies are a classic...

Science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr. wouldn't talk on the phone or appear in person. He developed friendships with contemporaries like...

A French philosopher is certain his ideas will help human beings evolve -- not just emotionally or psychologically. We will start to grow...

They say you shouldn't meet your heroes because you might be disappointed. What happens when you're told from now on you are your childhood...