Books

Trek fans the world over know the following names: Nomad... M-5... Landru... V’Ger... Finnegan... and, of course, Data. Star Trek has given the science fiction universe some of its most interesting and provocative AIs and androids, and with them an insightful flow of concepts to consider as AI makes its way into the real world. Now that we’ve...

Star Trek’s Cmdr. Data... Alien’s Ash and Bishop... Skynet and the Terminator... the androids of Westworld... Ex Machina’s Eva, the Stepford Wives - and the granddaddy of them all, HAL 9000... These and other famous artificial minds are at the heart of this exploration of AI and the possibility of machine consciousness, suggesting the directions...

Review after review of Space: 1999, in the Seventies and since, has noted that its more philosophical style is distinctive, not just from Star Trek, but from most TV sci-fi. It is one of the show’s trademarks – in its first season, anyway – and made it an important entry in the genre, over and above its groundbreaking look and style.

The show...

“The Robinson Biography, written as it was in the mid-21st century (and thankfully published on paper, we estimate around 2080-90) notably references, and thereby confirms, a number of sources thought by many to be apocryphal: the originaldocumentaries of HAL 9000, including the two scholarly Clarke accounts, and the two visual summaries by...

Can machines be intelligent? Yes, that seems settled; but can machines be conscious? That’s not nearly as clear. The dream of machines that not only think, but feel and experience consciousness as humans do has been a canvas of fantasists, a goal of technologists and a conundrum to philosophers for decades. Here in this brief collection are...

This most recent collection of Scott Robinson’s essays gathers together work from a number of previous collections, spanning many disciplines: artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, paleontology, and cognitive science, to name a few. Specific topics are equally diverse, including dissipative adaptation, humanism, feminism,...

Artificial Intelligence, long present in our cultural awareness and musings of the future, has finally arrived - and hasn’t taken the stage with any subtlety. From generative AI chatbots to disturbingly good deepfake art and video to breathtaking medical accomplishments, AI is here to stay - and now we have to figure out how to deal with that.

...

AI is moving forward at breakneck speed. Even in the short months since the first volume of this series was published, we’ve seen stakeholders lobbying the White House and Congress for regulatory action; AI doomers have gotten louder; breakthroughs in processing power and speed have been announced; and Hollywood writers and actors have even gone...

All my life, I’ve been tripping over jaw-dropping, fascinating ideas that few people have ever heard of.

This started happening in my early 20s, when I learned of Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘strange loops’ in Gödel, Escher, Bach. It continued with Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, where all possible books reside. John Searle’s Chinese Room; the...

The Library of Babel blew my mind. The idea of a ‘library of all possible books’, generated by an algorithm that can be written on a napkin – it’s a jaw dropper! That’s what it’s supposed to do, of course; it’s a consciousness-expanding thought experiment, one that rips the lid off many disciplines, from semantics to the theory of algorithms to...

The Trail of Tears is a tragic chapter in American history - as is the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the many that preceded it. The legacy of the European invasion of North America is, at this point, exhaustively documented; the abuses and injustices unleashed by white men on the indigenous inhabitants are, at this point, well known.

What is less...

The first volume of this series presented the concept of the indigenous critique – the observations of Native Americans, emerging in their early encounters with European explorers and colonists. These observations, recorded and pondered deeply by their Western counterparts and thinkers in Europe, challenged a broad array of assumptions and...

This omnibus volume combines the two previous entries in The Indigenous Critique series, which explore the concept of the indigenous critique – the observations of Native Americans, emerging in their early encounters with European explorers and colonists. These observations, recorded and pondered deeply by their Western counterparts and thinkers...

They long to end democracy.

There are three organizations in the United State that have all, in recent years, signaled and even said outright that Democracy’s day is done in the United States - and each is poised to replace it.

These groups include the Grand Old Party - US Republicans, who have declared for almost two decades now their desire to...

This collection of political essays, culled from other, more general collections, puts in one place a great many years of reflection, processing, and rants. The author has invested considerable time and effort in all three pursuits, and the results presented herein are as representative as any.

But this is also a generational portrait. The point...

Freedom is a word with too many meetings, justifying too many wrongs. This collection of essays surveys various aspects of freedom, from its ancient origins to the misuse and abuse of the concept, from the challenges it presents to the possibilities it holds. Humankind does not yet live free; but we could.

Since I was a boy, I’ve loved twist endings – in stories, on television, at the movies, anywhere they can be found. Give me a surprise ending, I’m in. I love them!

The Twilight Zone was, of course, the pacesetter in this arena when I was a kid, with episodes like “Eye of the Beholder” and “The Masks” and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”...

In the 30th century, human life expectancy has been extended hundreds of years - but it only works for the body. The mind must be rebooted, to make room for another lifetime of memories. When the moment is right, it’s time to Jump - to let the old life go and start a new one in a new place, with a new identity. Talyn Jain’s body is more than 700...

A team of time travelers find themselves stranded in the Paleolithic Era, and present themselves to the locals as deities... In a small northwestern college town, a rogue robot takes up petty theft... In an isolated rural diner in 1957 Georgia, a dark wanderer witnesses a confrontation between a brutal cop, two local hoodlums and a frightened...

This, Scott Robinson’s fourth collection of short fiction, focuses on horror.

Written with a nod toward the great Harlan Ellison, these 13 tales include some science fiction, some fantasy, and some in-between. There’s a time-hopping wraith who selects lives to take; a cell phone app that lures travelers into the dark; a starship crew seduced by...