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Back in 2007, I wrote a science fiction novella called “The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrrow,” about an immortal, transhuman survivor of an apocalypse whose father is obsessed with preserving artifacts from the fallen civilization, especially the Carousel of Progress, an exhibition that GE commissioned from Disney for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, which is still operating in Walt Disney World.
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/ / Homeland

There’s a scene in my novel Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) in which the first 1,000 digits of Pi are featured; when it came time to produce the audiobook edition, poor Wil Wheaton — the narrator — ended up reading out Pi for four solid minutes, with some entirely understandable difficulties. Nick Land set the reading to music, creating quite a delightful little tune!
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Séan Connors is a young adult literature researcher at the University of Arkansas, whose podcast, The Storyteller’s Thread, features long-form interviews with young adult writers “on their writing process; on social and political topics that influence their work; on their motivation for writing for young readers: and on other writers and artists whose work challenges and inspires them.”

I had the pleasure of recording with Connors on his latest episode (MP3), where we talked about youth activism and YA literature, how I became a writer and then a YA writer, and how schools could do a better job of teaching technical and privacy literacy.

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In my latest podcast (MP3), I read my short story “Affordances,” which was commissioned for Slate/ASU’s Future Tense Fiction. it’s a tale exploring my theory of “the shitty technology adoption curve,” in which terrible technological ideas are first imposed on poor and powerless people, and then refined and normalized until they are spread over all the rest of us.
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Henry Jenkins (previously) is the preeminent scholar of fandom and culture; Colin Maclay is a communications researcher with a background in tech policy; on the latest episode of their “How Do You Like It So Far” podcast (MP3), we had a long discussion about a theory of change based on political work and science fictional storytelling, in which helping people imagine a better world (or warn them about a worse one) is a springboard to mobilizing political action.

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Talking science fiction, technological self-determination, inequality and competition with physicist Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is a physicist at JPL and the author of many popular, smart books about physics for a lay audience; his weekly Mindscape podcast is a treasure-trove of incredibly smart, fascinating discussions with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
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