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We hear a lot about redemption arcs, but what about damnation arcs, where characters go darkside? In this episode, we talk about the "villain's journey," or the tropey route followed by characters li…

Recently Charlie Jane came up with a new term for stories she's been enjoying: Sweetweird. What does this mean, and is it a subgenre or an aesthetic? And also, why do we enjoy inventing and debating …

Plastic was once a symbol of our shiny future, and now it represents our trashed, polluted present. What's the future of this fossil-fueled polymer? We talk about what makes plastic so scary -- in sc…

Musicals transport us to another world through song and dance — but how can we use their otherworldly power to tell stories about robots and monsters? To find out, we talk to playwrights MJ Kaufman a…

In this special episode, we answer questions from our wondrous Patreon supporters. We discuss how to write convincing non-human characters, where people will live in 10,000 years, and why Dungeons & …

People have been paid for labor for at least 5,000 years, but the modern 'workplace' is a pretty recent invention. We look at how science fiction  has dealt with the transformation of labor — plus we…

Cars have made our lives better in many ways, but they also kill a lot of people and damage the environment. Science fiction has worked hard to help us fall in love with the automobile, to the point …

Why has darkness descended upon the university? We talk about the dark academia aesthetic, from Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" to the show "Dear White People." What defines this aesthetic, and ho…

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark court case that made abortion legal in this country, our future is looking very different. In this encore episode, we talk about…

Nothing is ever permanent in pop culture: people die and come back to life all the time, huge changes get retconned, and Spider-Man is always a young guy who's just starting out. Why are we stuck wit…

Paranoia’s back, baby. We talk about two Cold War obsessions — space combat and brainwashing — and how they’ve returned in a big way. Cold War tropes are haunting our science fiction and dominating p…

Princesses used to be helpless damsels, but these days they're more likely to pick up a sword than wait to be rescued. Why do we love princesses who fight back? Does it have something to do with our …

Humans have been trying to communicate with non-human animals for thousands of years. We have stories about magical talking animals, and tales of scientists who use technology to turn wild dolphins i…

Many people claim that if you traveled back in time, you could never succeed in changing the past---but our favorite time travelers break that rule. Why is it so fun to rewrite history? To find out, …

Science fiction is full of heroic journalists, and the real-life world of journalism is filled with people who have been deeply influenced by ideas from science fiction. In this episode, we talk abou…

The Wheel of Time is one of the biggest fantasy shows of all time, and now it's a huge TV show. How does the TV version handle the rigid gender divisions of the books? And how do the show's character…

The United States is growing more dysfunctional, and it's increasingly obvious that our political systems are designed to fail. Can we continue to exist as a unified country for another fifty years? …