Science Fiction
increasingly, now-casting
2019-12-23 — 2026-03-08
Wherein a Private Canon of Science Fiction Is Sketched, Recommendations Being Filtered by Audiobook Availability, and a Prefigurative AI-apocalypse Movie Night Being Arranged.
I read a lot of science fiction. What of it?
My favourite categories are probably:
- Strong on political economy, and/or
- Mind candy escapism with lots of explosions, but interesting protagonist, and/or
- Philosophically troubling
Related: techohorror.
FWIW, I get a lot of my recommendations from Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur; the set of books which are both mentioned there and available as audiobooks characterizes what I read pretty well.
1 Genealogy
2 AI takeover movie night
For your next AI Apocalypse movie night.
Here are some classics.
Terminator is a mandatory part of all AI movie nights ever.
Bladerunner. obvs.
Ex Machina. obvs.
The Matrix. obvs.
Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance most fowl. Weaponised robots.
Pilot Pirx’s inquest (1979) (Review): Pirx captains a spaceship of mixed human/superhuman androids amid labour competition. Low budget Soviet special effects from 1979. IMO, a great plot with miserably paced editing.
M3GAN 2.0: A girl’s AI doll friend is sorta aligned with her except more murdery. Also her guardian’s boyfriend runs PauseAI, and Xerox is evil.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines. It’s in the name.
Dark Star (1974) The “off switch” game for sentient bombs
Wall-E (2008) the Gradual disempowerment classic.
Serial Experiments Lain (1998) The anime classic about the internet and identity, less about explicit AI than the implicit algorithmic disempowerment
By the same token, Mrs Davis is about that too.
Pantheon, a mind-uploading singularity story.
Welt am Draht (1973) The classic German simulationist tv show, where human minds are uploaded into a simulation to test marketing interventions.
Phase IV (1973): Substrate independence! ASI arrives and it is made of ants
Autómata (2014) a post-apocalyptic Spanish film about robots and humans in disaster, successionism, AI control…
Will Smith’s I, Robot
Enthiran What if Terminator were Tamil and an incurable romantic?
Westworld (original and also the TV show). I quite enjoyed series 1 of this but then it kept on banging on and on and they just poured out more and more buckets of stage blood and I got bored and read the wikipedia summary.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Her
3 Incoming
Programmer Science Fiction - by Sam T. Oates
Because I don’t expect many people to read this post, I think the expected value of publishing it is positive.