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Curated category

Science fiction themes

  • AI takeoverIn 1980, the global artificial intelligence industry was worth a few million dollars. By 1988, that figure had surged to billions of dollars in just eight…
  • PostmodernismPostmodernism has been called the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. That description comes from scholar Louis Menand, who noted that it is…
  • Technological singularityThe technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates so far beyond human control that civilization itself becomes…
  • 3D computer graphics3D computer graphics began with a single man at Boeing. In 1961, William Fetter coined the term "computer graphics" to describe his work there.
  • TranshumanismTranshumanism is a philosophical movement built on a single, startling conviction: that the human condition is not fixed. In 1923, the British geneticist J.
  • Space colonizationSpace colonization is the idea that human beings might one day build permanent settlements beyond Earth, on other planets, moons, asteroids, and perhaps even…
  • Global catastrophic riskGlobal catastrophic risk names a category of hypothetical events severe enough to damage human well-being on a planetary scale, or to end the human story…
  • MultiverseThe multiverse is the hypothetical set of all universes. Not just our own observable cosmos, but every universe that could exist, bundled into one vast…
  • MechaMecha are giant robots or machines, humanoid walking vehicles that have captured the imagination of audiences across the world for over a century.
  • Human outpostHuman outposts are artificially-created, controlled habitats placed in environments that would otherwise be fatal to the people living inside them.
  • HyperspaceHyperspace first appeared in the pages of Amazing Stories Quarterly in 1931, planted there by a writer named John Campbell who needed a way to move his…