At one of my children’s sporting events a few weeks ago, another parent arrived to cheer on our sons’ team carrying a foldout chair in one hand and, in case the game was a blowout, a book in the other ...

A s a fannish undergraduate in the late 1990s, I took a creative-writing workshop thinking I might write science fiction. I was quickly disabused of that notion. “I don’t do science fiction, and I don ...