Constellation: Making the Graphic Novel

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 we right and when were we horribly wrong? In a wide ranging discussion, we return to all of our favorite topics, from privacy to technological unemployment to the rate of technological progress. So what's next for the podcast? Upcoming episodes will focus on the writing and development of our next graphic novel, a sci fi tale we are extremely excited about. The title will change but we'll be using this same feed to broadcast, so we hope you will remain subscribed and stick with us on this new journey.

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 in a version of the world today and the walkaway movement, that embraces abundance by largely eschewing personal property. It's a fascinating world if not always a compelling read from a literary perspective.

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 spoilers, so watch the movie first if you'd rather not have the twists revealed.

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 government duties to private actors.

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 works, extracting artistic concepts from either AIs or comatose brains, and what can be done with an artist's brand without their consent. In the end it's a little muddled what is being said, but it's an interestingly complex episode.

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 an immersive video game. We discuss the plausibility of such technology and the ways the episode depicts the wider world, and interrogate some of the interesting things that come up around sex and embodiment. 

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, it also contains a richly detailed speculative world. We use it as a jumping off point to discuss ovafusion, uploaded mammals, paths to AI, and more.

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 the next episode to review another story in this book, The Lifecycle of Software Objects.

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 Dick and how close this show gets to representing it.

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 and personal freedom. We use it as a jumping off point to discuss speculation of human and robot indenture, the future of intellectual property enforcement, and more.