These 21 books about technology and its impact on society are crucial to understanding our fractious future — There was a quiet but serious shift in mainstream thought about technology underway this year, even before everything went to hell. …

Read OneZero’s interview with author Anna Wiener — Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a ruminative and cutting memoir about tech startups in the 2010s, is officially one of the best books of the year—at least, according to the New York Times. On Monday, the paper placed the book on its always buzzy top-10 list. Earlier this year, OneZero held…

If anyone has any ideas about what the hell is going to happen this week, it’s speculative fiction writers — Seemingly infinite branching futures lay before us, most of them bad-shaped. Will the pandemic and wildfires leave us in withered, blasted ruins? Will the new Supreme Court finally transform us into a full-blown theocracy? Will voter suppression continue unabated until election day? Will the militias show up? …

From ‘Parable of the Sower’ to ‘Sorry to Bother You,’ these works of visionary fiction will help you conceptualize and create a more just world — This piece is part of a series on visionary fiction we’re running on OneZero to examine how future culture can affect change now. In her companion feature about the growing genre, Walidah Imarisha, author, educator, and co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, explains how stories…

These early and overlooked books revealed Facebook was plagued from the start — and are crucial to understanding it now — Hardly a week goes by without another Facebook scandal. Frustration with Facebook and criticism of it — even despair over it and outright hatred of it — seems constant, evergreen. It’s been this way since at least the 2016 election. There are now more journalists investigating the world’s largest social…

‘New Atlantis’, Francis Bacon’s pioneering work of proto-science fiction, has just been reissued. Here’s why it still matters. — Utopias are one of the earliest, most straightforward forms of speculative fiction. Beginning with Thomas More’s 1516 faux travelogue about the strange, egalitarian land of Utopia that gave the concept its name, telling stories whose chief aim is to describe what an ideal world might look like became an enduring…

Put simply, Ted Chiang is one of our generation’s greatest speculative fiction writers. This may seem like hyperbole, but we believe it to be true: Reading Ted Chiang will make you a better person, on a level that no self-help book ever can. His stories force us to engage with…

What the long history of the autonomous vehicle reveals about its fast-approaching future — The first self-driving vehicles were ships. After centuries of wrestling with wind and waves, ancient sailors devised contraptions that harnessed these forces of nature to fill in for man. They were simple but ingenious solutions, like the sheet-to-tiller system, which is still used today. To rig it, you simply take…