With the announcement of the new those-bad-sequels-never-happened Alien movie, it’s been forgivably easy to forget that Neill Blomkamp has a totally different sci-fi film coming out this week. Chappie is the story of the creation of a new form of thinking machine, and looks to be cresting a wave of new cinematic depictions of artificial intelligence. A.I. also plays a role in […]
When I was an unfortunate looking teenager, I took a very powerful acne drug with some very scary side effects, side effects serious enough that the manufacturer included drawings of the horrible things it would do to a baby if a pregnant woman took it. But, as real life and fiction have proven time and […]
Science Fiction often deals with the connections between science/technology and society. These books can influence our assumptions and paradigms about the world we live in today. Q: What book have you loved that explore the connection between society and technology, and how did it influence how your worldview?
I recently read and enjoyed Ramez Naam’s Nexus, a book with a central premise that has preoccupied science fiction since H.G. Wells first spun up The Time Machine: the next stage in human evolution. Naam imagined a sort of unified hive mind in our future, and the idea that the next evolutionary step is a telepathic link between […]
“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change…” – Margaret Atwood, Slate.com Since long before “climate change” was a phrase on every politician’s lips (and before it, global warming, greenhouse gasses, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, and on and on), science fiction has considered […]