African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate
When the writer Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism, she wanted to distinguish sci-fi written about Africa from Afrofuturism, which is focuses on the experiences of Black people in the…
Towers of Silence
this story is about a specific thing but also about how a system collapses when the keystone is removed
Secrets of the Planet of the Apes, with Josh Friedman
The Planet of the Apes franchise spans decades and formats: it started as a French novel in 1963, and then jumped the Atlantic to become a long-running series of movies,…
Untold Killing
Over the course of a mid-Summer week in July 1995, more than 8,000 men and boys were systematically killed in a small Bosnian town called Srebrenica. 'Untold Killing' tells the…
An African perspective on the history of Africa
Africa's story has long been presented in western narratives as one that only 'began' with the arrival of non-Africans – yet modern science has revealed that the African continent was,…
The world’s humblest heroes, from plumbers to tardigrades
Inspired by The Super Mario Bros Movie, we're talking about a humble class of heroes whose lives are devoted to infrastructure maintenance and repair. There are heating engineer rogues and…
Mother-in-Law of Oz
The Wizard of Oz is deeply ingrained into our culture. While many people can practically recite the 1939 movie, the original source material isn’t as well known. The Wonderful Wizard…
Chinese sci-fi has crossed the translation barrier
Netflix's lavish new adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem is the latest 'translation' of one of this century's best, and best-selling, sci-fi novels. In this episode, we track the…
How Ada Lovelace Constructed Her Wings
When Annabella Millbanke had a daughter with her husband, Lord Byron, she was terrified that their child might inherit his poetical madness. And so she steered the girl, Ada, toward…