The Nobel-winning author, whose newest book is out this week, discusses work by a few of her favorite writers. The Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's fiction is known for its interest in the porosity of boundaries--between nations, between ethnicities, between fiction and reality, consciousness and dreams. As her novels and stories stage the constant flux of national borders, particularly in Eastern Europe (Tokarczuk is Polish), they also delight in supernatural and science-fictional elements. In " House of Day, House of Night," out from Riverhead this week, she writes, "All over the world, wherever people are sleeping, small, jumbled worlds are flaring up in their heads, growing over reality like scar tissue." Not long ago, Tokarczuk sent us some remarks about a few of her favorite sci-fi and speculative-fiction writers, whose books mix the fantastical and the prosaic masterfully.

The Philadelphia punk band Mannequin Pussy got its name from an offhand joke that a friend made years ago, now lost to history. The group has always had certain appellative affinities. Two early demos, from 2011, were called "BonerJamz!" and "Meatslave." The band's four members were in town for a gig at Rough Trade recently. On their day off, they visited the Museum of Sex, to see the exhibit "Radical Perverts."

"We are going to speak of the future," the Polish writer Stanisław Lem wrote, in "Summa Technologiae," from 1964, a series of essays, mostly on humanity and the evolution of technology. "Yet isn't discoursing about future events a rather inappropriate occupation for those who are lost in the transience of the here and now?" Lem, who died in 2006 at the age of eighty-four, is likely the most widely read writer of science fiction who is not particularly widely read in the United States. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, many millions of copies of his books have been printed, and yet, if I polled a hundred friends, 2.3 of them would know who he was. His best-known work in the U.S. is the 1961 novel "Solaris," and its renown stems mostly from the moody film adaptation by Andrei Tarkovsky. Among Lem's fictional imaginings are a phantomatic generator (a machine that gives its user an extraordinarily vivid vision of an alternate reality), an opton (an electronic device on which one can read books), and a network of computers that contains information on most everything that is known and from which people have a difficult time separating themselves.

IBM is one of the oldest technology companies in the world, with a raft of innovations to its credit, including mainframe computing, computer-programming languages, and AI-powered tools. But ask an ordinary person under the age of 40 what exactly IBM does (or did), and the responses will be vague at best. "Something to do with computers, right?" was the best the Gen Zers I queried could come up with. If a Millennial knows anything about IBM, it's Watson, the company's prototype AI system that prevailed on Jeopardy in 2011. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. In the chronicles of garage entrepreneurship, however, IBM retains a legendary place--as a flat-footed behemoth.

What do androids really dream about? It's apparently not electric sheep, according to this surprising video of the'world's most advanced robot'. In the video, Ameca, a humanoid robot designed by Cornish startup Engineered Arts, is asked whether she dreams. Ameca's response might come as quite a shock, as she replies: 'Yeah!' Accompanied by strangely lifelike facial expressions, she continues: 'Last night I dreamed of dinosaurs fighting a space war on Mars against aliens.' However, Ameca quickly follows this up by saying: 'I'm kidding, I don't dream like humans do but I can simulate it by running through scenarios in my head which help me learn about the world.'

This piece is part of Outward, Slate's home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. I've had a lot of dick in my DMs. Lopsided dicks caught pallid in the camera's harsh flash. Let me tell you: The onslaught has been relentless. I have had the full variety of male organ paraded before me.

"I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards." What do we talk about when we talk about science fiction? Science challenges us to imagine the world differently. Fiction invites us to imagine other selves in other lives -- and, like science, challenges us to imagine the world differently, or other worlds entirely. Technology is in some sense a blend of the two, turning scientific concepts and innovations into tools that improve or enhance human lives.

Small Robot Company (SRC), a British agritech startup for sustainable farming, has developed AI-enabled robots – named Tom, Dick and Harry – that identify and kill individual weeds with electricity. These agricultural robots could reduce the use of harmful chemicals and heavy machinery, paving the way for a new approach to sustainable crop farming. The startup has been working on automated weed killers since 2017, and this April officially launched Tom, the first commercial robot currently operating on three UK farms. Dick is still in the prototype phase, and Harry is still in development. Small Robot company says the robot Tom is capable of scanning around 20 Hectares per day, collecting about six terabytes of data in an 8-hour shift to identify the crops, spots undesirable weeds – using "Wilma," an artificial intelligence operating system.

In a sunny field in Hampshire, a killer robot is on the prowl. Once its artificial intelligence engine has locked on to its target, a black electrode descends and delivers an 8,000-volt blast. A crackle, a puff of smoke, and the target is dead – a weed, boiled alive from the inside. It is part of a fourth agricultural revolution, its makers say, bringing automation and big data into farming to produce more while harming the environment less. Pressure to cut pesticide use and increasing resistance to the chemicals meant killing weeds was the top priority for the farmers advising the robot company.

Video games are nothing without their main characters. Unlike movies or TV, video games are a place where fans get to play the protagonist--help save the world, their friends, and themselves. It's not essential that players agree with every move their character makes. But it's generally key that they have some kind of emotional connection with the character. It's true that video game heroes frequently fit into a narrow set of molds, but generally their cookie-cutter personalities are at least not grating. In other words, no one wants to play the asshole.