Welcome to Stranger Than Fiction, a new six-episode podcast from Slate, the New America Foundation, and Arizona State University. Each week, Tim Wu—a Future Tense fellow at New America, the author of The Master Switch, and a professor at Columbia Law School—talks to a contemporary science fiction writer about whether we’re living in the future.
In the debut episode, Wu talks to Neal Stephenson, the award-winning science fiction author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and more. They discuss the purpose of science fiction, geek culture, and whether—contrary to our constant hand-wringing about “everything changing so fast”—innovation has really slowed down.