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Star Trek is back in a big way: we've had three live-action TV shows and two animated shows recently, with more stuff on the way. But what does Star Trek mean to us now? And what do we want from Star…

Summer is almost here, and there's no shortage of amazing books, movies and TV shows to read by the pool. (Or wherever you consume your entertainment. We don't judge.) How can you make sense of all t…

Ten years ago, Silicon Valley promised us smart houses that would light rooms as we walked into them, turn on the music, and do our shopping. And it never happened. We talk about how the smart home h…

Games are packed with astounding worldbuilding, and Dungeons & Dragons is perhaps the worldbuildiest of all. We take a deep dive into the game’s transformation from from a Satanic threat in the 1980s…

When tech whizkids are caught behaving badly, they're just being "brilliant jerks." And the figure of the charismatic-but-bratty genius inventor is everywhere these days. We look at how the isolated,…

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 ap…

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 mos…

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, smar…

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…

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 believa…

Avatar: The Way of Water has already become one of the most successful movies of all time. This long-awaited sequel gives us a lot to think about — from the ongoing white savior narrative to an unexp…

Anne Rice is best-known for her Vampire Chronicles, which began in the 1970s with her novel Interview with the Vampire. But did you know she also wrote bestselling BDSM erotica and two novels about J…

The winter holidays are coming up, and it's a great time to hide away with a stack of books. Good thing we've got you covered! Here's our roundup of our favorite recent books, including some you prob…

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy supercharged the genre of epic fantasy, giving rise to countless stories of heroic quests in settings that looked like Medieval Europe. How do we expand the map of…

One of the most cherished tropes in science fiction is the idea that technology, science, and civilization are always getting better -- and the future will be wealthier and fancier than the present. …

Classic science fiction wears its love of colonialism on its sleeve, from heroic explorers to space empires that keep the peace. Why are empires such a major part of the genre, and how do we break fr…

Fears of nuclear war are in the news again. We revisit a 2019 episode about how science fiction has dealt with atomic weapons, and how twenty-first century writers will represent the dangers of nucle…

People talk about "pacing" all the time when it comes to storytelling — but what does "pacing" mean? How do you make a story feel like it's moving faster or slower, and why does this matter? And how …

Floods. Sea level rise. Superstorms. Droughts. All over the planet, people are being hit by disasters caused by too much water or not enough, and it's only going to get worse. We talk about why scien…

It's time to get some therapy, with some help from speculative fiction. In this special live recording from WorldCon, we talk to actor/creator Theo Germaine about fictional therapists (good and evil)…