The political economy of speculative fiction
Excludes Emissaries of Profits from the feed.
Androids and Assets teams up with The Hugo Girl Podcast to review the 2018 novel The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal.
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A special Christmas Episode of Androids and Assets where the boys and special guest Candace talk about the reason for the season, struggling against empire.
We also recommend: Divine Intervention (2002) Dir Elia Sulieman
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C.S. Malerich joins us to talk about her novella, The Factory Witches of Lowell, a story about an early unionization effort that gets a magical boost. The most important part of the struggle, though, is still solidarity.
You can get The Factory of Witches of Lowell through our Bookshop affiliate link, we get a small kickback, if you do.
Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar – This is How You Lose the Time War
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky – Hard to Be A God
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The Androids and Assets team sits down with journalist Paris Marx of Tech Won’t Save Us to talk about the ongoing struggle for the future of technology and by extension the future of humanity.
Follow Paris and Tech Won’t Save Us on Twitter.
Paris has written articles on this topic and a few are collected here for you.
Aaron Bastani’s ‘luxury communism’ is a false future
Jeff Bezos and His Billionaire Space Fantasy
Jeff Bezos’s Vision of the Future Is Basically Blade Runner
Elon Musk Is Planning for Climate Apocalypse
Paris mentioned a whole bunch of great things to read and we’ve done our best to list them all here for you.
I Can’t Bring Myself to Stand in Line for Food Again by Mirta Ojito
Utopia, not futurism: Why doing the impossible is the most rational thing we can do by Murray Bookchin
Eco-Socialism or Bust by Thea Riofrancos, Robert Shaw, Will Speck
A Path to Democratic Socialism Means a Path To Climate Justice by Thea Riofrancos
The Green New Deal as proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin and also everything else she ever wrote.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
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Premee Mohamed joins us to discuss her debut novel, Beneath the Rising. We discuss how the world works differently for wealthy people and those that make dark covenants with creatures from other dimensions. We learn that science undergrads are wretched creatures and that you should not ever under any circumstances try to create a Chambers Reactor.
Find Premee on Twitter
Hear Premee on Breaking the Glass Slipper
A Broken Darkness, the sequel to Beneath the Rising is out in March 2021.
The Raven Tower by Anne Leckie
Embers of War by Gareth Powell
Winter Tide and Deep Roots by Ruthanna Emrys
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Gold, Gil, Cred Stick… I sit down with two long time observers of of videogame history to talk money in games. We explore how what started as the bothersome fife of enterprising teens has become a big business.
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It’s the third anniversary of starting this podcast so we’re doing our third Luc Besson film. (You’re right, we started on a Luc Besson film and if we did one every anniversary this would be our fourth. You got us. We missed one.)
Lucy is a terrible movie; starting from a flawed premise and ending in a flawed conclusion. It’s also racist and misogynist. It gets all of the science wrong. It misunderstands human history. The bar doesn’t get much lower than this.
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Gautam Bhatia, author of The Wall, joins us to talk about his debut novel. The Wall is chock full of ideas and questions the role of law, the effects of strictly constrained resources, and how hierarchy interacts with democracy.
We mentioned our Bookshop; unfortunately, The Wall is not included in that database so you will have to ask your local bookseller to find it.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
Chosen Spirits by Samit Basu
Analog/Virtual: and Other Simulations of Your Future by Lavanya Lakshminarayan
Mending Wall by Robert Frost
“Something of Freedom is Yet to Come”: The Entangled Histories of Science Fiction and Capitalism by Olav Rokne in Strange Horizons
And Now His Lordship is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas in Strange Horizons
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Marshall and Stephen discuss the age old question, “Autobots or Decepticons? ,” and think maybe the answer is “why not neither?”
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A Universal Basic Income is relatively common in science fiction, thanks in large part to the ubiquity of Star Trek. The idea that people don’t need to compete for basic needs might feel futuristic but there are ways we can, and should, make that happen today.
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