All Your Futures Are Science Fiction

The future doesn't arrive from nowhere. Long before we live in it, some authors and creators, they imagine it. They've imagined machines that think, civilizations remade by technology, or the climate, or war, or an idea. And again and again, science fiction gets there first. I think it's interesting that the things and ideas that were once in books are now in the world.

In this podcast, we're going to dissect some of the best science fiction there is, many of them that did get there first. Now I think some introductions are in order. Hello. I'm your host for this podcast. My name is Gary Frank.

And the voice you're about to hear is my freshly minted AI assistant, Juliet. She opens every episode for us.

This is the All Your Futures podcast, episode zero, Introductory Trailer.

Anyway, this isn't a plot summary podcast. We're going inside these books, the ideas, the language, the science and the history behind them, and the questions that we're still arguing about decades later. These books aren't interesting just because somebody imagined rockets and robots and artificial intelligence. They're interesting because they imagine what those things might do to us. Now we're going to go ahead and post the plan list on the website.

Juliet will tell you about that. And Juliet's going to also tell you where that spoiler wall's at. And let me put something out there before we start. I'm not an academic. I'm not a professor.

I'm not a critic. I'm not some licensed judge of literature. Professionally, I engineer complex systems for my vocation. And now I'm trying my hand at this podcast. And it turns out this is a decent way to arrive at how we're looking at this first book.

So we're going to begin with Frank Herbert's Dune, published in 1964.

1965.

Okay, 'sixty five. Because Dune is a complex system, its ecology, the water economics, genetics, religion, the imperial politics, and a supply chain with exactly one supplier. Not one piece of that whole setup is set dressing. If you pull out any one of those things, any one of those subsystems in systems terms, the whole thing falls over. Now, I've been reading this book since I was in my twenties, and it still is turning up new Easter eggs for me or just, you know, turning over new things, new ideas.

It's a very, very deep book. And I'll admit this challenge upfront, you know, I know how it ends, and I've known for decades. So I'm going to find some new threads in this for us. Okay? So you can read along with me, every episode tells you exactly where it stops.

And this is marked by Herbert's epigraphs. He didn't use chapter numbers. By using the epigraphs or actually he did use books, so he has different books here. So we'll use books and we'll use the epigraphs. And no matter which edition you're holding, that's going to work for you.

And we won't mention any spoilers beyond that point in the book. I'll see you on Arrakis. All your futures ARE science fiction.

The reading for the first episode dedicated to Frank Herbert's Dune is as follows: Begin at the beginning and stop when you get to the epigraph that says, "On that first day when Muad'Dib rode through the streets of Arrakeen with his family, some of the people along the way recalled the legends in the prophecy." He's been reading that one since he was 23. He still finds things in it. I think that's rather remarkable, actually. We welcome your email communications sent to ayf at allyourfutures dot com.

You've been listening to the All Your Futures podcast, an Alton Street media production. Follow the show wherever you're standing. Start at episode one, Read at your own pace. He'll wait.