Imaginary Worlds

When Arvind Ethan David was a student, he decided to adapt the Douglas Adams novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency into a play. Arvind didn’t imagine that Adams would show up to see the play (...

2 Juli 202544min

The animated TV series Pantheon (streaming on Netflix) asks what if you could upload your mind to the Internet? Would still be human? Would we create a virtual paradise where everyone got to live fore...

18 Juni 202543min

Murderbot is a killing machine in the far future that would rather spend its time binging an intergalactic soap opera. Shooting bad guys with lasers is much less stressful than making eye contact or e...

4 Juni 202538min

Next year marks the 60th anniversary of Dark Shadows. The gothic soap opera wasn’t originally intended to include a vampire, but when creator Dan Curtis introduced the character of Barnabas Collins in...

21 Maj 202539min

We all have that one thing we just can’t watch. For me, it’s body horror -- the kind of horror where grotesque and disturbing things happen to someone’s body, like in The Thing, The Fly, or The Substa...

7 Maj 202537min

Last week, we heard about a new exhibit in New York called Syd Mead: Future Pastime. The exhibit closes on May 21st, and I know most listeners won't be able to see it in person. So in this bonus episo...

30 Apr 202551min

The late Syd Mead was a visual futurist who was hired to imagine the worlds of Blade Runner, Tron, Aliens, Elysium and other sci-fi films. His work in Hollywood has been lauded for decades, but there’...

23 Apr 202536min

The golden age of sci-fi was filled with utopian visions the future. These days, when sci-fi creators project ahead several decades, the world is looking a lot more dystopian. But there is a group of ...

9 Apr 202539min