Imaginary Worlds: Robot Collar Jobs
Are we prepared for a future where robots are the most sought after employees? In her debut novel Autonomous, Annalee Newitz imagines a future where humans take designer drugs to try and…
This American Life: We Are in the Future
One of our producers, Neil Drumming, has recently become fascinated with Afrofuturism. It's more than sci-fi. It’s a way of looking at black culture that’s fantastic, creative, and oddly hopeful—which feels especially urgent…
100 Must-Read Sci-Fi Fantasy Novels By Female Authors
Nikki VanRyMay 2, 2016 Ready for your TBR list to explode? I’ve gathered the 100 best sci-fi fantasy novels by female authors and there is sooooo much reading goodness to…
This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017
I would not call the world of Blade Runner strange, because it’s the opposite of strange. It’s familiar. If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting…
Are We Living in a Simulation?
Elon Musk thinks we definitely could be, and it seems he is not alone. The idea that we might simply be products of an advanced post-human civilisation, that are simply…
Why Science-Fiction Writers Couldn’t Imagine the Internet
On Star Trek, humans talked to computers—they even used something like floppy disks and memory sticks—but nowhere did crew members get information from ethereal machines whose locations and identities were…
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…
Ray Bradbury’s Practical and Inspiring Writing Advice
Bradbury was full of wit and wisdom when it came to dishing out practical writing advice. His 1990 book Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity is a…
100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction
Tales about a world gone wrong.