In 1942, a 22-year-old chemistry student and part-time writer set down three short rules for how a fictional robot ought to behave. His aim was to kill off the lazy "robot-as-Frankenstein-monster" cliché. More than eighty years later, real engineers, real ethicists and real lawmakers are still arguing about them.

This is the first of two episodes on Isaac Asimov — one of the "big dogs" of science fiction whose output ran to some five hundred books. John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach take on the most enduring part of that legacy: the Three Laws of Robotics. The Laws went on to power nine linked short stories in I, Robot, several films, hundreds of academic papers, and an argument about AI safety that shows no sign of ending any time soon.

In this episode:

• The man and the output
• Robots before Asimov
• I, Robot as nine thought experiments
• Susan Calvin — one of SF's first great female scientists
• The Three Laws and the trolley problem
• Coming next: Foundation

Links and resources:

• Website: techimaginarium.co.uk
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.

Every genre has a shadow canon — the writers who don't make the syllabus, don't sell out on Amazon, and rarely get the Netflix series. In science fiction, that shadow canon is where some of the most intellectually adventurous, politically serious and formally daring work of the twentieth century was done.

Having opened the series with the big names — Wells, Verne, Poe, the Mount Rushmore of the genre — John and Ezri jump forward to the late 1960s and 1970s and turn to five authors most listeners won't know: Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, John Sladek, John Brunner and Christopher Priest. Feminist SF, satirical SF, dystopian SF set in a Britain going to the dogs. The thread that connects them is "prescience", a word that keeps coming up. Were these writers really predicting the future – or just paying close enough attention to the present?

In this episode:

• Why 1969 makes such a strange hinge point — Apollo 11 and the realisation of Goddard's cherry-tree dream, set against the assassinations of 1968, Vietnam, Prague, Altamont, and the first wave of environmental science
• Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell, and the New Wave: Moorcock's New Worlds, Ballard's "inner space", and SF's discovery that it could not avoid politics
• Kate Wilhelm — Hugo, Nebula and Locus winner for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, a co-founder of the Clarion Writers' Workshop who is now better known as a mystery writer
• Joanna Russ — The Female Man, written in 1970 but unpublished until 1975, and How to Suppress Women's Writing; a Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalist who chose literature as her weapon
• John Sladek — the satirist whose robot in Tik-Tok has had its "asimov circuits" go on the blink, and whose hoax book on a thirteenth sign of the zodiac proved people will believe anything stated with enough confidence
• John Brunner — the "Club of Rome Quartet", the novel that coined "worm" for self-replicating code, and Stand on Zanzibar, set in 2010 and unsettlingly familiar by the time we got there
• Christopher Priest — Fugue for a Darkening Island and A Dream of Wessex, the racial framing Priest himself later grappled with, and The Prestige (with David Bowie as Tesla)
• The big question under all of it: what is the difference between prescience and prediction — and is it significant that "prescience" contains the word "science"?

Links and resources:

• Website: techimaginarium.co.uk
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.

A hundred years ago this spring, a magazine called Amazing Stories hit the newsstands and — almost by accident — gave a name and a shape to the genre we now call science fiction. Its publisher, Hugo Gernsback, was an immigrant electrical engineer, visionary and relentless self-promoter. He wanted his magazine to delight and enthrall – but also to educate.

In this opening episode of The Tech Imaginarium, John and Ezri go back to 1926 to ask why this peculiar pulp magazine matters — and why its mix of techno-optimism, prophetic vision and dystopic warnings still echoes through the way we talk about technology today.

In this episode:

• Hugo Gernsback: Luxembourg-born inventor, publisher of Amazing Stories, and author of stories under at least seven anagrams of his own name
• The strange scientific weather of 1926 — electrification, mustard gas, Einstein, Schrödinger and Hubble — and why it primed the public for "scientifiction"
• The first issue's contributors: Wells, Verne and Poe in one corner; George Allan England, G. Peyton Wertenbaker and Austin Hall in the other
• Robert Goddard, H.G. Wells and the through-line from pulp magazines to the Apollo Moon launches
• Why Gernsback's reputation was contraversial — paying writers poorly, exaggerating circulation, etc.
• The tropes Amazing Stories planted that we're still living with

Links and resources:

• Website: learninghackpodcast.com
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Music by Nick Dwyer and Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.