Phil Plait, creator of the popular astronomy blog Bad Astronomy, credits his interest in outer space partly to his childhood love of science fiction movies such as Angry Red Planet and Robinson Crusoe on Mars. "I'm a huge science fiction dork," Plait says in Episode 541 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I've watched every TV show, just about, and movies and everything, read tons of books. In his new book, Under Alien Skies, Plait explores what various cosmic vistas would look like for a person who was physically present, studying them with ordinary human eyesight. "I open each chapter with a short vignette, basically a fictional tale," he says. So I say'You are at this planet,' 'You are standing on the bridge of your starship,' 'You are standing there watching a dust storm approach you on Mars.' Plait hopes that the book will serve as a valuable resource for filmmakers and science fiction authors looking to inject an extra dose of reality into their speculative visions. "I've actually done some consulting for movies and TV shows, and even a couple of video games," he says. "So I kind of know that process of advising writers, or other folks who are involved in the entertainment business, of what the real science is." As much as Plait enjoys seeing science fiction that incorporates real science, he recognizes that the ultimate aim of any book or movie is to tell a good story. "Even if they don't get the science correct, it's OK, because you're still inspiring people," he says. "And if they get the science right?

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022, which collects 20 of the best fantasy and science fiction stories of the past year, features a wide range of characters and settings. Guest editor Rebecca Roanhorse made the final selections for this year's volume. "This is not your father's science fiction and fantasy collection," Roanhorse says in Episode 538 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I'm excited to see what people are writing, and where the genre is going, and what sort of new voices can be discovered, and how far we can push boundaries and still tell universal stories." P. Djèlí Clark's genre-bending "If the Martians Have Magic" features Haitian priests battling the alien invaders from The War of the Worlds. "I always think my stories are too weird," Clark says.

Sam: I laugh at the stupid Prophecizers who are so certain of technological Singularity, for ex: Kurzweil. He is a fraud or worst, an inductivist idiot. Just plot a line of past progresses against time, and extend that "exponential" line to the future. And voila you have got Artificial General Intelligence and the fountain of youth. Chris: So you think AGI is a myth that will never happen?

One side effect of unlimited content-creation machines--generative AI--is unlimited content. On Monday, the editor of the renowned sci-fi publication Clarkesworld Magazine announced that he had temporarily closed story submissions due to a massive increase in machine-generated stories sent to the publication. In a graph shared on Twitter, Clarkesworld editor Neil Clarke tallied the number of banned writers submitting plagiarized or machine-generated stories. The numbers totaled 500 in February, up from just over 100 in January and a low baseline of around 25 in October 2022. The rise in banned submissions roughly coincides with the release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT have been trained on millions of books and websites and can author original stories quickly.

Melinda Snodgrass is the novelist and screenwriter best known for her classic Star Trek: The Next Generation script "The Measure of a Man." Her latest novel, Lucifer's War, pits an unlikely band of heroes against a horde of Lovecraftian monsters that have been spreading fear and ignorance throughout human history. "It's unbelievable now, the kind of nonsense people are accepting, that's being pushed on them by social media," Snodgrass says in Episode 529 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I really wanted to make a stand for science and rationality, as opposed to magic and superstition." The book is set in Snodgrass' home state of New Mexico, a place where science and superstition clash in a particularly striking way. "It's a very weird place, where you have Los Alamos laboratory, Sandia laboratories, high-tech, high-energy centers," Snodgrass says, "Some of the finest scientific minds in the world come here to lecture and study and commune with each other, and then on the other side you have people who will balance your aura and sell you a crystal to deal with your cancer."

Sign up to receive the Future Tense newsletter every other Saturday. The U.N.'s COP27 climate summit kicks off on Nov. 6 in Egypt, inviting us, once again, to consider whether we're doing enough, fast enough, to stave off climate chaos and the suffering that will come with it. The scale of change required is head-spinningly drastic, so even unexpectedly rapid expansions in clean energy won't do much to curb malaise and doomsaying. Here in the U.S., the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate investment in the nation's history, has been met, largely, with collective indifference, despite positive buzz about its potential effectiveness. The bill was, predictably, passed without any Republican votes, a grim reminder of the scale of climate denialism.

The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter. When it premiered six years ago, Westworld epitomized prestige sci-fi at its peak. An expensive HBO series with an old-school Michael Crichton pedigree, it featured a stellar cast and a mind-trippy premise: What if all the sentient robots, or "hosts," at a Western theme park decided they'd had enough of being kicked and dragged around? Subsequent seasons revealed the influence of artificial intelligence and reached far beyond the borders of the Westworld attraction, a global mess of money, corruption, and consciousness-tampering that was nightmare fuel for viewers watching at home while scrolling through Twitter. It was a hit--even if a modest one.

In 1966 a television series called "Star Trek" introduced the communicator, a device Captain Kirk flips open to talk to his crew remotely. Decades later, in the mid-1990s, Motorola released its StarTAC model phone--credited as the first flip phone and clearly inspired by the communicator device from the science fiction series. Likewise, "2001: A Space Odyssey," a movie released in 1968, introduced the idea of video calling, with which most of us have become all too familiar in the past year. And the list goes on--autonomous cars, cars that can fly, smartwatches and virtual reality, just to name a few more. There are several visionaries who have inspired our thinking and design principles.

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed depicts a society with no laws or government, an experiment in "nonviolent anarchism." Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was impressed by the book's thoughtful exploration of politics and economics. "After reading The Dispossessed, I was just blown away," Kressel says in Episode 460 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It was just such an intellectual book. It's so philosophical, and it was so different from a lot of the science fiction I had read before that. It made me want to read more of Le Guin's work."

One thing nerds like to argue about is what nerds are allowed to argue about. If you agree to stipulate that science fiction is often one of those things--and, hey, we could argue about that--then a problem to solve is the boundaries of that genre, the what-it-is and what-it-isn't. Finding the edges of science fiction is like taking a walk around a hypercube in zero-gee; you keep bumping into walls and falling into other dimensions. Reasonable people don't even agree on when it started-- Frankenstein? A story where a ghost kills people is horror; what if a robot did it?