After fifty years of books, games and movies, what more could the Aliens franchise deliver? The description "genre-defying" gets thrown around a lot these days - it is a convenient sticking plaster for any film or series that hasn't quite figured out what it wants to be. That said, it is an apt term for the Alien franchise. Ridley Scott's 1979 movie Alien, in which Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is part of a crew trapped on a spaceship with a salivating, scorpion-like "xenomorph", had such blood-curdling visuals that it made an indelible impact on both science fiction and horror films. But while the deadly parasite and its psychosexual torment were ever present, subsequent instalments tried their hand at being everything from a blockbuster to a prison flick to a philosophical drama.

Unfortunately one aspect of the novel that has dated badly is its stereotypical view of gender roles. Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek was initially intrigued by the book's female lead Wyoming Knot, and was disappointed that the character plays such a minor role in the story. "I do not want to be a woman in that revolution, sitting around serving the coffee," Yaszek says. "It really makes you understand what women were up in arms about in the 1960s." Listen to the complete interview with Anthony Ha, Robby Soave, and Lisa Yaszek in Episode 516 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed depicts a society with no laws or government, an experiment in "nonviolent anarchism." Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was impressed by the book's thoughtful exploration of politics and economics. "After reading The Dispossessed, I was just blown away," Kressel says in Episode 460 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It was just such an intellectual book. It's so philosophical, and it was so different from a lot of the science fiction I had read before that. It made me want to read more of Le Guin's work."

I never met Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight, in Portland, Oregon, her home for many years. And yet we became good friends during the last two months of her life, entirely by way of e-mail. I inaugurated the correspondence on November 21, 2017, and she replied on November 24th. One of the things I like least about being very old is the unreliability of my energy. Working at poetry or a story is, always has been, the job I want to be doing, the work that keeps me steady and content.