I’m on the latest episode of Innovation Hub (MP3):

Science-fiction is a genre that imagines the future. It doesn’t necessarily predict the future (after all, where are flying cars?), but it grapples with the technological and societal changes happening today to better understand our world and where it’s heading.

So, what does it mean when so much of our most popular science-fiction – The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, and The Hunger Games – present bleak, depressing futures? Cory Doctorow might just have an answer. He’s a blogger, writer, activist, and author of the new book Walkaway, an optimistic disaster novel.

Three Takeaways

* Doctorow thinks that science-fiction can give people “ideas for what to do if the future turns out in different ways.” Like how William Gibson’s Neuromancer didn’t just predict the internet, it predicted the intermingling of corporations and the state.

* When you have story after story about how people turn on each other after disaster, Doctorow believes it gives us the largely false impression that people act like jerks in crises. When in fact, people usually rise to the occasion.

* With Walkaway, his “optimistic” disaster novel, Doctorow wanted to present a new narrative about resolving differences between people who are mostly on the same side.

Back in May, I stopped by Wired UK while on my British tour for my novel Walkaway to talk about the novel, surveillance, elections, and, of course, DRM. (MP3)

Last month, I appeared onstage with Edward Snowden at the NYPL, hosted by Paul Holdengraber, discussing my novel Walkaway. The library has just posted the audio! It was quite an evening

Last week I sat down with Mike Masnick, the crusading technology journalist who coined the “Streisand Effect” and runs the fantastic site Techdirt, and we had a good, chewy discussion (MP3) about my new novel Walkaway; he’s just posted it to the Techdirt podcast. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!