Review The Future

Lobbies, Strobing, Consolidation and Empire

2030, The Ancestral Plain, Babies and Pets

Final Devs, Eating and Sleeping, Regeneration, Default Homeworld

Devs, Ted Chiang, No Interworld Communication

Newborn Rights, Money World, Interworld Communication

Upload, Having Kids and Copying Minds, AI Limits

Deleting Worlds, Personal Avatars, The Transition, Mental Aging

Ejection, Entrance Contracts, Religions Inside the Constellation.

Corona virus, It Follows, keys and tips.

Introducing the broad science fiction concepts and writing principles behind our next graphic novel.

After nearly 100 episodes, we’ve decided to dramatically change the format of the podcast: this episode will be the last traditional Review the Future episode! We are taking this opportunity to reflect back on six years of podcasting and review ourselves. Which predictions seem more or less correct given the passage of time? When were […]

Cory Doctorow’s novel WALKAWAY is the subject of this episode. Ted and Jon discuss the novel’s plot (and this one is full of spoilers, so if you haven’t read it yet beware!) and the wild sci fi ideas inside: emulated brains, matter printers, post-capitalist visions of society, and a growing rift between ‘default’-dwellers who live […]

Jon and Ted review I AM MOTHER, a Netflix movie directed by Grant Sputore and written by Michael Lloyd Green. The story is about a robot that raises a human child. We cover the more and less believable aspects of the story, and consider whether the chain of events dramatized seems realistic. This one is full of […]

This episode is about Smithereens, the second episode in season 5 of Black Mirror. The episode features a hostage situation caused in part by social media addiction. Jon and Ted use this episode to discuss the increasingly governmental role played by social media and other large tech companies, and speculate about the future of devolving […]

This episode is about Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too, the third episode in season 5 of Black Mirror. Sure, it’s another story with emulated brain technology where it’s only applied in one narrow way, but its fun fairytale tone helps forgive that and there are a few genuinely interesting speculations, including about how musical creativity […]

If you were waiting for an episode in which Jon says “shooting orgasmic fireballs,” today’s your lucky day. This episode we look at the STRIKING VIPERS episode of Black Mirror season 5. In it, two friends who are straight men in real life fall in love while playing avatars of differing gender (and race) in […]

In this episode we review the story The Lifecycle of Software Objects from the collection Exhalation by Ted Chiang. The story is about a pair of startup employees who train and bond with software beings created by the company they work for. It’s a metaphor for parenting, but being a longer story with several breaks in time, […]

In this episode we review the story The Truth of Feeling, The Truth of Fact from the collection Exhalation by Ted Chiang. The story is both a philosophical inquisition into memory and technology, and a carefully envisioned speculative take on an advanced video memory replacement software that surfaces memories using AI. We’ll be back in […]

Crazy Diamond, the fourth episode of Amazon’s anthology of Philip K Dick adaptations, is the subject of this week’s episode. We discuss the primary technical supposition in the story, chimeric genetically engineered pig-people, and use that as a window to discuss human genetic engineering and enhancement more generally. We also discuss the elusive tone of […]

We discuss Annalee Neuwitz’s novel Autonomous, a sci fi story set in a world of biotech and aggressive patent enforcement. The book is a two hander about a drug pirate named Jack Chen and a robot named Paladin who awakens and finds love. It’s thematically about the meaning of autonomy, both in terms of political […]