Fiction

The Tech Imaginarium

by John Helmer

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United Kingdom · Fiction

#162

Pulse 5

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About the show

How Science Fiction Made the Modern World. Since its birth a century ago, this fascinating genre has been turning science fact into fictions that have captured the imagination of millions. John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach explore how these stories have, in turn, inspired developments in technology that shape all our lives today.

Latest episodes

Three Predictions from SF That Came True ... And Three That Didn't.

July 13, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min

Did science fiction predict AirPods? Neuralink? The death of God? For this final episode of Season One, John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach give you what hacks call a listicle: three transcendently significant things prefigured in science…
Frankenstein: Man Made Man

June 27, 2026 · 45 min

How a teenage girl's waking dream birthed what is (probably) the first science fiction novel – and in the process gave the world its most enduring image of technology gone wrong. This time we're coming for the myth, the curse, the cliche…
Asimov 2: Foundation

June 13, 2026 · 57 min

Can the future of an entire civilisation be calculated like the behaviour of gas molecules? In the second of two episodes on Isaac Asimov, John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach turn from his robots to his other great franchise — the Foundation…
Asimov 1: The Robot Laws

June 6, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

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…
TI02 5 Foundational SF Authors You've Never Heard Of

May 31, 2026 · 1 hr 5 min

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…
Amazing Stories is 100!

May 25, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

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…
Launch Trailer — Welcome to The Tech Imaginarium

May 22, 2026 · 7 min

In 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that computers would let every person learn what they wanted, in their own time, at their own speed. Forty years on, that vision is more or less the world we live in. So what else might science fiction have…