Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…
100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction
Tales about a world gone wrong.
Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to “Make America Great Again”
By Abby Aguirre July 26, 2017 Octavia Butler’s tenth novel, “Parable of the Sower,” which was published in 1993, opens in Los Angeles in 2024. Global warming has brought drought…
How to Recognize a Dystopia: Watch an Animated Introduction to Dystopian Fiction
Literature and film can open up to the depth and immensity of social truths we find profoundly difficult, if not impossible, to articulate. If our political vocabulary (as Oxford Dictionaries…
From beyond the grave
trying to hold onto someone after they are dead
Culture through the lens of robots
I feel like these three Podcast Eps are really interesting to listen to one right after the other. About what culture means and how it impacts the way we see…
Beyond the Iron Curtain
Comrades! The USSR pioneered the craft of science fiction long before the decadent West. This is not an opinion - this is a scientific fact. Noted intellectuals Anindita Banerjee, Sibelan…
200 Years of Frankenstein
All the science that Mary Shelley experienced first-hand came together and led to her writing Frankenstein. {listen} I always loved the book as way to understand what a terrible burden consciousness…