Science Needs Fiction
Annalee Newitz
May 8, 02018
Science fiction does more than predict future inventions. Stories are a testbed for exploring the unexpected ways people could incorporate technology into their cultures. Science journalist and novelist Annalee Newitz will discuss how scientists, innovators, and the rest of us benefit from the crucible of imaginative fictions.
Annalee is the author of the bestselling novel Autonomous. Her nonfiction book Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. She is the founding editor of io9.com, and formerly the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Currently she is editor-at-large for Ars Technica. Her work has appeared in New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, Wired, Washington Post, Technology Review, 2600, and many other publications. Formerly she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.
Upcoming Talks
Videos

Johanna Hoffman
Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Foster Resilience and Co-create the Cities We Need
October 12, 02022


Creon Levit
Space Debris and The Kessler Syndrome: A Possible Future Trapped on Earth
April 26, 02022


Brittany Cox
Horological Heritage: Generating bird song, magic, and music through mechanism
August 20, 02019


Elizabeth Lonsdorf
Growing Up Ape: The Long-term Science of Studying Our Closest Living Relatives
April 30, 02019



James Holland Jones
The Science of Climate Fiction: Can Stories Lead to Social Action?
January 29, 02019



Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, Alexander Rose
Siberia: A Journey to the Mammoth Steppe
January 22, 02019



Caroline Winterer
The Art and Science of Deep Time:
Conceiving the Inconceivable in the 19th Century
September 4, 02018


Esther Dyson
The Short Now: What Addiction, Day Trading, and Most of Society’s Ills Have in Common
July 17, 02018



Hannu Rajaniemi
The Spirit Singularity: Science and the Afterlife at the Turn of the 20th Century
July 10, 02018



Shahzeen Attari
Facts, Feelings and Stories: How to Motivate Action on Climate Change
June 26, 02018



Renée DiResta
Disinformation Technology: How Online Propaganda Campaigns Are Influencing Us
April 10, 02018

Scott Kildall
Art Thinking + Technology: A Personal Journey of Expanding Space and Time
August 15, 02017


Miles Traer
The Geological Reveal: How the Rock Record Shows Our Relationship to the Natural World
June 27, 02017


Andrew Lakoff
How We Became “Unprepared”:
Imagining Catastrophe from the Cold War to Bird Flu
May 30, 02017


Jennifer Petersen
Why Freedom of Speech Is More Than Speech:
Expressions in Media and Code
April 18, 02017


Tara Behrend
The Psychology of Surveillance:
How Being Watched Changes Our Behavior
February 28, 02017


Ben Novak
The Next Flight of the Passenger Pigeon: Engineering Nature's Engineers
September 27, 02016
