Alternate worlds

In recent years science fiction has burst from its ghetto in the pulp magazines and monster movies and has once again captured an ever-widening circle of serious readers. With best-selling novels emerging from the genre (Giles Goat-Boy, The Andromeda Strain, On the Beach, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Terminal Man—the list is endless) and with such big-budget movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes, science fiction has come into its own as the most relevant fiction of our time. In ALTERNATE WORLDS, one of the best-known writers in the field traces "speculative writing"…