Category: Science fiction
We’re excited that you’ve joined the conversation! At HMU, we want to continue the great authors’ conversations in a contemporary context, and this blog will help us do that. We look back to Aristotle and the early philosophers who used reason and discourse to gain wisdom and now we endeavor to do the same every day.
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November 7, 2025
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In October, I was fortunate enough to join the Great Books Council of San Francisco for a discussion of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. This book depicts an apocalyptic scenario in southern California. It begins in a tightly controlled suburban neighborhood. Stucco walls and metal fences offer a sort of boundary line between the community and the much darker,
April 11, 2025
Thanks to 2025 HMU Fellow in Ideas, Rachel D. Perez, for today’s post.
With the rise of artificial intelligence and rapid advancements in technology, even the fundamental aspects of human education and child-rearing are being called into question. As we move toward an era where machines increasingly shape our world, one might wonder: Can AI disrupt our humanness? In this blog, I argue that Mother in I Am Mother may represent the ideal tutor Rousseau envisioned in Émile.
» Read more about: The AI Tutor: Revisiting Rousseau’s Philosophy in a Technological Age »
September 6, 2024
Thanks to Tyler Wright, a 2024 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
How must we approach signs of life which defy our present understandings of what it is to be alive? Viruses, for instance, are periodically reexamined by scientists as they exist in a sort of transitory area between the living and nonliving (Villarreal, 2004). A specimen might exhibit characteristics so unique that a new branch of life begins to emerge.
May 17, 2024
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s blog.
Metaphor was born from curiosity. From metaphor comes astonishing revelations. Such was the experience of this year’s April Quarterly Discussion. We discussed two short stories written by completely different authors, one by the contemporary science fiction and fantasy author Ted Chiang, and one by the Canadian Lucy Maud Montgomery.
Montgomery’s story “The Man on the Train,” first published in 1914,
Thanks to Aaron Ducksworth, a 2023 Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
November 10, 2023
Many movies of various genres have been made about the relationship between humans and anthropomorphic technology and the complicated relationship between them – think The Terminator franchise (1984-2019), I, Robot (2004), Virtuosity (1995), and The Matrix franchise (1999-2021). M3GAN is different! Not because it attempts to bridge the gap between horror and science fiction through an AI-based film,
» Read more about: FILM REVIEW: Philosophical Roots in Tech-Horror »
February 3, 2023
Thanks to Chad Greene, a 2023 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
The tradition of utopias in imaginative literature – whether in a dialogue by Plato, a comic by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, or a movie by Ryan Coogler – is an attempt to answer some of the most essential “big questions” at the heart of the humanities. What is justice? What would a just society look like?
» Read more about: Read Classics, Then Watch … Wakanda Forever »
September 17, 2021
Thanks to Rebecca L. Thacker, a 2021 HMU Fellow in Ideas, for today’s post.
Although I won’t deny the pleasures of “art for art’s sake” (I’m no stranger to a lazy day curled up with a plot driven page-turner), as a feminist cultural studies scholar, I’m interested in the role literature can play as a cultural change agent. Whether intentional or not, all literature is political.
» Read more about: Science Fiction and Liberatory World-building »
May 7, 2021
The Deep by Rivers Solomon — Review by Rebecca Thacker
“Our mothers were pregnant African women/Thrown overboard while crossing the Atlantic Ocean on slave ships/We were born breathing water as we did in the womb/We built our home on the sea floor/Unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers/Until their world came to destroy ours.”
– Clipping, “The Deep”
The 2019 novella The Deep is a richly imagined,
November 16, 2018
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
In Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin has her protagonist, Genly Ai, travel to the distant planet Gethen which has no birds or flying insects. As a result, the communities there never even thought to attempt flight and their language has no word for flying. It is no wonder, then, that the people mistrust Genly who arrives by airship.
August 24, 2018
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
How do algorithms know which options are right for you? They are purportedly a mathematical calculation based on personal tastes, previous preferences and your own interaction. I will use examples from Pandora and Netflix to express my meaning, but really, I could broaden this discussion to any number of entities. Also, I am using a very broad understanding of algorithms for this general discussion.