Mar 23, 2023
If you haven't read any short stories in a while, it's a great time to get back into them. A ton of truly excellent books of short speculative fiction came out recently, and wondrous new tales are appearing in magazines all the time. We talk about some of our favorite new books of short stories — and we offer some...
Mar 9, 2023
This is the first in a series of monthly episodes we’ll be doing about how Silicon Valley appropriates and misinterprets science fiction. Silicon Valley executives claim to be inspired by SF, but mostly they use it retroactively to justify their products, often missing the more complicated, nuanced ideas embedded in...
Feb 23, 2023
Everybody obsesses about A.I., nanotech, space travel and robots. But the technologies nobody pays much attention to could have an equally significant impact on our world. Like artificial wombs, smart toilets, new forms of public transportation, and new cleaning machines.
Show...
Feb 9, 2023
Gender essentialism is the idea that there is something eternal and innate about people's gender identities, and nothing can change that. Popularized during the 1970s, it affected how science fiction stories represented gender -- and it spawned new academic disciplines devoted to scientific misogyny. We talk about all...
Jan 26, 2023
We're going to ask a few very small questions in this episode, like how to build a planet from scratch -- and then, how to build governments on that planet. What makes an imaginary world feel believable? Annalee explains what they did to research their new novel The Terraformers (coming out 1/31). Expect some gritty...