The Voice Was the Easy Part
Spike Jonze's soft-focus romance predicted the product, the marketing and the loneliness, and then wrote an ending that the industry has quietly agreed never to ship.
Why Every Sci-Fi Interface Is Made of Glass
Spielberg asked for a computer you could conduct like an orchestra. The future that arrived was a pane you stroke with one thumb, sitting down. The difference is a story about elbows.
Default Settings Are the Real Legislation
In 2012 the British government braced for three in ten workers to quit their new pensions. About one in ten did. The most powerful law in your life may be a box somebody else ticked.
The Agents, Reviewed
Science fiction promised us a someone. In November 2026 we have twelve very fast interns, a few of them excellent, and none of them should be left alone with the backups.
The agents are here. We're tracking all 133 of them.
| Contagion 2011 | 100% | 100% | — | 7.8 | |
| Black Mirror: Smithereens 2019 | 100% | 100% | 2029 | 7.3 | |
| Little Brother 2008 | 99% | 100% | 2030 | 6.9 | |
| Humans 2015 | 98% | 100% | 2027 | 6.6 | |
| Neuromancer 1984 | 96% | 100% | 2030 | 8.7 | |
| Pattern Recognition 2003 | 96% | 100% | 2035 | 7.9 | |
| The Capture 2019 | 96% | 100% | 2029 | 7.6 | |
| Upgrade 2018 | 96% | 100% | 2030 | 6.4 |
The future is not coming. It is being made, right now, by whoever bothers to imagine it.
Read Notes Toward a Better Branch