Matt Ward is man of many talents: an author, entrepreneur, startup advisor and business coach, and a futurist who hosts the Disruptors.FM tech podcast. Ward has a diverse background: a passion for science and technology, coupled with a love of adventure, backpacking through Southeast Asia, South America, and beyond.

Greetings, young ones. May the fourth be with you. And if for some reason this article comes out the next day, then long live the fifth. Either way, for Jedi and Sith alike, today is basically one of the largest pop culture holidays of all time. I can't think of any others so widely celebrated. As padawans and their masters celebrate more than 40 years of the force, it’s important to look back where it all started.

The legendary Philip K. Dick authored 44 published books and over 150 short stories. Over the generations, sci-fi minds have repurposed Dick's stage of the strange and otherworldly when writing, filming, or creating the future of technological advancement - inescapable dystopian realities. PKD's long, outstanding, and unrivaled legacy has created a ripple effect of his own timeless infamy, portrayed in all of the work he has inspired.

John Crowley is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called "a neglected masterpiece" by Harold Bloom, and his Ægypt series of novels which revolve around the same themes of Hermeticism, memory, families and religion.

He stole our hearts in the Twilight franchise, then again took our breath away in Samuel Bayer's reimagining of A Nightmare on Elm Street only to find ourselves picking our jaws up off of the floor after watching him kick some major ass in the The Legend of Hercules. His versatility and talent is as undeniable as his charismatic good looks but there is still more than meets the eye with actor Kellan Lutz – and it's a whole lot nerdier than you may have imagined.

I’ve just finished reading Andy Weir’s new book, Artemis. This time, Weir’s characters inhabit a colony on the moon in the late twenty-first century. Because there’s been so much talk recently about the colonization of Mars, I was interested to learn what Weir had to say on the moon becoming a colony versus Mars.

Andy Weir rose to fame with the publishing and subsequent film production of his debut novel, The Martian, published in 2011, but, as his dedicated fan base knows, his writing career began much earlier.

For some, the name Peter Robbins conjures pages from the British-Best Selling book, Left at East Gate: A First-Hand Account of the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident, Its Cover-up, and Investigation. The controversial book covers the 1980 incident in which there were reported sightings of unexplained lights near Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England. There have also been claims of UFO landings and the control of nuclear weapons on the nearby Bentwaters Base by said UFOs. The Rendlesham Forest case has become wrapped in controversy, recently centering around one of the key witnesses.

Orson Scott Card was the first ever author to win back-to-back Hugo and Nebula Awards with Ender's Game and Speaker of the Dead. With an impressive collection of books, plays, and short stories in his repertoire, in recent years Scott Card has expanded his Ender universe to the big screen with the 2013 film adaption of Ender's Game starring Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, and Ben Kingsley, and now with BYUtv's new sci-fi series, Extinct.

Four hundred years after the extinction of the human race, a small group of humans is revived on the earth by an alien civilization. The aliens claim they want to restore the humanity, but the "reborn" humans uncover new dangers, hidden agendas, and powerful secrets that challenge and threaten to annihilate the species once again.

A long time resident of Wales, Alastair Reynolds is a best selling science fiction author, specializing in a form of space opera that is peppered with dark noir and gothic influences that still possesses a sense of optimism. He earned his PhD in Astronomy from the University of St Andrews (Scotland) in 1991 and went on to work for the European Space Agency. While there he became more focused on writing, working on short stories and eventually turning his attention to his first novel, Revelation Space, which was published in 2000. Due in much part to the Revelation Space series and his masterful storytelling, he was soon elevated to one of the new generation of science fiction masters. In 2004 he left his astronomy career behind to pursue writing full time.

Writer / producer Rob Kutner is an Emmy-award winning writer who has worked on some of the most influential late night shows, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Conan. Most recently he's made a foray into comedic genre fare with his book, The Future According to Me, which has 35 funny takes on what tomorrow might look like, and his graphic novel, Shrinkage, about the American president's brain being hi-jacked by aliens. I had the opportunity to chat with him and get his take about the intersecting worlds of comedy and science fiction.