I never start writing a science fiction book without first asking scientists a lot of extremely strange questions. My next novel 鈥� A Wall Is Also a Road, which comes out on 6 October 鈥� was a particularly tough case. I decided that my main character would be a cellular slime mould who is also a graduate student. Why not? I certainly spent most of graduate school feeling like an amoeba.

Gardenpath, the slime mould in question, is studying environmental science at a university that floats high above our galactic plane in a gaseous region known as the circumgalactic medium. You may not have heard of it, but this roughly spherical space is where the Magellanic clouds orbit 鈥� two dwarf galaxies near the Milky Way 鈥� along with rogue stars, planets and other chunks of random crap squirted out by Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy. It鈥檚 full of all kinds of stuff that could support an advanced civilisation, from metals to water.

Before I could even begin to imagine what Gardenpath looked like, I needed to understand where they live. So I called up at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, whose lab made stunning simulations of the circumgalactic medium (you can see them on the web at ). She gave me a tour of this distant region, which is full of spots where the swirling gas is warmer or colder, almost like weather.

I decided that the slime moulds would experience the circumgalactic medium the way humans experience the atmosphere on Earth. Their single-celled bodies could be absolutely enormous in this low-pressure environment full of diffuse gases. Living in this region of space would affect the slime moulds鈥� understanding of what is scientifically possible, too. That鈥檚 why Gardenpath鈥檚 fellow scholars think the galactic plane 鈥� where we live 鈥� is utterly lifeless and uninhabitable. Who could possibly survive in that radiation-saturated gravity well?

Gardenpath literally fumes when their professors scoff at their proposed area of study: a little planet inside one of the Milky Way鈥檚 spiral arms. But they don鈥檛 express rage by emitting sound waves that agitate molecules in a soupy, thick atmosphere like we do. Instead, they spurt electrons, hormones and other chemicals, opening receptors in their membrane to receive answers. On Earth, we call this cellular signalling. To Gardenpath, it鈥檚 just talking.

, a molecular biologist at Northern Illinois University, spent a long afternoon with me on a video call brainstorming about what kind of culture would develop among polymorphous people who communicate by swapping smells through apertures in their skin. A diffuser would be like a megaphone, I suggested, and a specific gas like methane could serve as a question mark. Swingley added that the slimes would need an organelle for storing memories, which I dubbed a gnosome. Because their membranes are permeable, Gardenpath鈥檚 professors can actually reach inside their body to probe their gnosomes during a test, which is just as creepy as it sounds.

Cells have many single-purpose receptors, which led us to think about something I called an 鈥渙ath receptor鈥�. Think of it as a biological friendship ring. When Gardenpath鈥檚 classmate Oriel wants to become BFFs forever, the two of them reach inside each other to create special receptors that can only receive their friend鈥檚 signals. It would be as if your bestie gave you a set of custom ears that can only hear their voice.

What else do slime mould graduate students need? A way to publish their findings, of course. The slimes store data inside fungi, so their libraries look like nurseries packed with containers of mushrooms. Want to send some data over the network? Plug your fungus notebook into a vent and release a bunch of spores that will bring your information to its destination.

I also created slime mould body language. These blobby little guys get bumpy when they are nervous and stretch up tall to laugh. They sprout more eyestalks when something intrigues them and dangle an extra-long arm to add a sarcastic edge to whatever they are emitting.

This makes things especially weird for Gardenpath on Earth, because humans look like people who are laughing sarcastically while paying very little attention to anything with their paltry two eyes. Still, they manage to find a friend among these weird creatures, a woman named Murtis who lives in a city called Pompeii, at the foot of a very intriguing volcano.

Don鈥檛 worry 鈥� I talked to a lot of archaeologists to get ancient Roman culture just right. Thankfully, Pompeii expert at the University of Massachusetts Amherst walked me through Pompeiian plumbing and told me about the famous 鈥減rosciutto sundial鈥� discovered in Herculaneum, a site nearby. If you want to know how that fits into the story, you鈥檒l have to read it!

In 800 years, a group of students is sitting in a graduate seminar devoted to an era known as the Void Ages. They鈥檝e read a couple of books and watched some of the two-dimensional, low-resolution media once called 鈥渕ovies鈥�. A few students even assembled devices to experience 鈥渧ideo games鈥� 鈥� interactive stories devoted to accumulating digital representations of value 鈥� using the original controllers. The professor is explaining the psychology behind why game controllers looked like fists covered in nipples, when somebody鈥檚 hand shoots up.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 understand why we have so little media preserved from this era. Everything is fragmentary, and most of what we鈥檝e read in this class was reconstructed from probabilities. Was it because of the atomic wars? Or the Fire Years?鈥�

鈥淣o war or global wildfire could do this,鈥� the professor answers gravely, uncoiling a liquid metal tentacle to point at a time map on the wall. 鈥淧eople from this era fed their culture into large language models and disposed of the original texts. All we have left is the output of ancient algorithms. We have to reverse-engineer what people were doing from that.鈥�

鈥淪o, we can never know if any of what we鈥檙e studying in this class is actually what people knew or saw or believed? It could all be generated by LLMs?鈥�

鈥淭hat鈥檚 right. There鈥檚 a reason why we call it the Void Ages.鈥�

More students break into the conversation, voices overlapping, frustrated and fascinated by the mystery of this pivotal era when their ancestors decided to subsume their greatest works of culture into a word-guessing model, the kind of thing a child would do to wreck their sibling鈥檚 homework.

It sounds bonkers, but this is the future we鈥檙e building for ourselves right now. When we feed books, movies, games and art into generative AI models, we risk replacing our own cultural history with a mishmash of auto-generated works that offer nothing to future generations who will be desperate to know what we were thinking. It鈥檚 as if we are deliberately recreating the tragic void at the heart of Bronze Age history, an era when humans transformed their civilisations across the globe 鈥� and left virtually no written narratives behind to explain what the hell happened and why.

As a writer of both science journalism and science fiction, I continue to be appalled by the idea that using an LLM could substitute for the experience of writing to, for and about each other. The point of writing, of creating culture, is to communicate my own weird way of looking at the world. It鈥檚 my letter to you, another weirdo probably. And it鈥檚 my letter to the future, my record of what one hairless ape experienced in the very specific era of the early 21st century, in the urban region currently known as San Francisco. It鈥檚 a human record, for other humans.

Back in 2020, when I was freaking out because I had no idea how to survive a global pandemic, . In 1666, he was a regular Englishman, just trying to survive a terrible wave of plague. Pepys worried about big-picture stuff like global politics and the meaning of life, but he also wrote about how to hide a wheel of cheese when you flee London and what it felt like to walk down a street where doors were painted with the red crosses of quarantine. Reading his words was soothing, because it was like he had reached out to me across the centuries to reassure me that I was not alone. That is the value of expository writing, and the value of history.

Of course, when I write fictional stories about time travellers and robots, I鈥檓 not recording an exact experience of real life. But I am still capturing the anxieties and hopes of my time. There are things you can say in fiction that you can鈥檛 say in journalism; I can reflect social ambiguities and fantasies, the biases that say more about us than facts ever could. The works of George Eliot and H. G. Wells are remembered today not just because they are engaging, but because they capture 19th-century aspirations and fixations, the little psychological tics that reveal how humans reacted to their rapidly industrialising world.

I鈥檓 not against the use of generative algorithms in code development, or as an aid in analysing big data. I am as devoted to the scientific project as the next nerd. But we need human writing as much as we need technology. Neither can replace the other. If we truly want to understand the universe, we need records of the human world as well as the physical one. When we feed all our writing to AI, we risk losing more than individual works of literature. We lose our connections to each other, in the present, past and future.

Ariel Waldman is standing all alone on a planet that looks a lot like Mars. At her feet are rock shards and barren soil. Overhead are jagged mountains streaked with dusty ice. The sky is a hazy white; the sun appears very far away. And then, Waldman smiles, explaining that she鈥檚 in Antarctica鈥檚 dry valleys, a vast stretch of deep-brown earth between frozen mountains and ancient glaciers. Maybe she鈥檚 not coming to you live from another planet, but in her new docuseries , she may convince you that Earth is more alien than you realised.

Now available on PBS, Waldman鈥檚 6-episode series is a journey into the microscopic jungle that lurks in our planet鈥檚 crust. Embedded with a soil-science team on Earth鈥檚 southernmost continent, Waldman brought her own microscopes, a macro probe lens that captures depth of field when shooting minute landscapes, a drone, and several complicated camera mounts to film the world鈥檚 most unsung wildlife in situ. She also filmed herself as she worked, creating a fascinating record of what it鈥檚 like to study an ecosystem that is undergoing a rapid, and sometimes violent, transformation due to climate change.

From the seemingly lifeless valleys of Antarctica to the bubbling wetlands of the North American prairies, she introduces us to animals including nematodes, rotifers and tardigrades, tiny creatures who shape and nourish our ecosystems while remaining invisible to the naked eye. Most impressive of all, she filmed her journey to Antarctica entirely on her own.

Sitting in her cozy office in San Francisco, surrounded by microscopes and cabinets full of photographic equipment, Waldman told me that a big part of her motivation is to chronicle environments in Antarctica and the prairies before they disappear. 鈥淚f you want to do a nature documentary in [the dry valleys] of Antarctica, you need microscopes to see the animals that exist there,鈥� she told me. The same goes for the prairies, where the vast majority of biomass lurks deep in the soggy ground.

As the official curator of the , Waldman also wants to normalise the idea that we should look at the dirt through microscopes as often as we peer through telescopes at the sky. That鈥檚 another reason she loves the microcosmos. 鈥淲hen we鈥檙e thinking about finding life on other planets or moons, our best guess is that we would find something microscopic.鈥� In Life Unearthed, she films tardigrades (also known as water bears) under the microscope, wiggling their puffy legs and booping into plant cells. These cute little guys can survive in the extreme cold of Antarctica and the sweltering prairies 鈥� and even the vacuum of space. They hint at the kinds of characters we might find beyond the safe envelope of our atmosphere.

I first met Waldman when she was working with NASA and running , an organisation that connects citizen scientists with space-exploration projects. She introduced me to CubeSat, a group of people into orbit. Later, she created , a global event I attended where scientists and enthusiasts can collaborate on everything from data gathering to software development. Since then, we鈥檝e become friends, and I鈥檝e followed her unique career that blends science, art and community organising.

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I visited her the day before she left for Antarctica, when her biggest worry was how she would get as much equipment as possible into her suitcases. Unlike the scientists she works with, Waldman鈥檚 deep academic background is in graphic design. She doesn鈥檛 merely want to research the planet, she wants to show it to people, to encourage them to get a cheap microscope and 鈥渏ust throw things under it鈥�. When people can see life in all its diversity, she believes, we become more confident about advocating for its conservation.

Influenced by the famous 1977 Eames short film , Waldman thinks that scale is a key way to understand our place in the universe. That鈥檚 why she needs drones for aerial views, as well as her beloved microscopes 鈥� and, when she鈥檚 chasing prairie crayfish in their underground burrows, she even uses a camera on a long wire that鈥檚 designed for snaking into clogged pipes. 鈥淗umans are both very small in the universe and very large in the universe, depending on your perspective,鈥� she mused. So much of life is 鈥渧irtually invisible to us without technology鈥�.

Waldman hopes that Life Unearthed inspires more people to pick up a microscope and check out all the invisible wildlife beneath their feet. To understand the true wonder of nature, we need to see it first.

The robot army that saves the world won鈥檛 be anything like what you imagine. Nope, they aren鈥檛 little humanoids who can do synchronised martial arts like the ones who dazzled audiences during . And they won鈥檛 help you find a can of Coke with embarrassing slowness like from Elon Musk鈥檚 Tesla Inc. Instead, they will be microscopic, and mostly made of algae, bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Engineers call them biohybrid microrobots.

If you鈥檝e read about people swallowing pills full of tiny robots to deliver medicine 鈥� or you watched the classic 80s flick Innerspace 鈥� you鈥檝e already experienced the dream of a microrobot future. For many years, medical researchers have imagined using little machines to get medicine into the hard-to-reach parts of our bodies such as the minuscule capillaries in our lungs. Even better, these machines could actually drive around in our organs, perhaps to seek and destroy cancer cells one by one. The problem is that we can鈥檛 actually build motorised devices small enough to do it.

That鈥檚 where biomedical engineer Joseph Wang鈥檚 work comes in. Like many in the growing field of microrobotics, Wang has dramatically expanded the definition of what most of us think of as 鈥渞obots鈥�. Any mechanism that can be controlled and move around semi-autonomously is a robot, much like the squishy, pneumatically powered turtle bot I described in a previous column. And some robots contain living tissues 鈥� or entire living creatures.

There are many things technology simply can鈥檛 do as well as biology 鈥� and one of them is motor around inside minuscule environments. Tiny synthetic engines tend to dissolve after a few minutes, Wang says, but 鈥渁lgae just swims and swims鈥�. That鈥檚 why he and his colleagues power their robots with the green microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

At the University of California, San Diego, Wang鈥檚 lab worked closely with chemical engineer Liangfang Zhang鈥檚 research group to create . They began with C. reinhardtii, which can swim with its powerful flagellum, or tail. It also happens to love blue light, so it is relatively simple to guide this single-celled critter by shining a blue light on its target region. Wang and Zhang can even get massive swarms of the algae into formation: by shining the blue light through a screen with a shape cut out of it, they herded thousands of algae cells into forming a circle, square and even more complex designs.

To disperse the swarm, the researchers used a red light. In a video demonstration, they show a swarm under the microscope moulding itself into the shape of the African continent and then scattering again. Essentially, Wang and Zhang created a microrobot army, 鈥減rogrammed鈥� to move in particular ways by blue and red lights.

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To turn this swarm into a microscopic medical team, they expose the algae to nanoparticles that stick to their outer membranes via electrostatic force. The result is half-algae, half-synthetic, all bot. Researchers can guide the fully loaded microbot swarm towards a wound using blue light. One day, doctors might use the masking technique to create custom-shaped algae bandages with many kinds of therapeutic payloads.

Other parts of the body call for a different kind of algae motor. For stomach exploration, Wang says, he and his team had to use where it had become used to acidic environments. That鈥檚 right 鈥� toxic mining sites produced algae that might one day swim to the rescue with drugs to treat your stomach cancer.

Light is just one way to program the bots. 精东传媒s can also 鈥� organisms that navigate via Earth鈥檚 magnetic field 鈥� then guide them around inside an animal鈥檚 body using electromagnets. Regardless of whether the payload rides on algae or bacteria, it鈥檚 referred to as 鈥渁ctive鈥� medicine. Traditional drugs are called 鈥減assive鈥� because they can鈥檛 be programmed to target specific regions or cell types. The hope with much of this research is that more medicine can become active, leading to more effective therapies, fewer side effects and less invasive treatments.

Medicine isn鈥檛 the only possible application for biohybrid microrobot swarms, either. Wang鈥檚 lab is also in rivers and oceans. Instead of loading the bots up with medicine, researchers cover them in chemicals that can neutralise or absorb toxins. The algae wriggle around in the water, often for days, collecting toxins opportunistically until everything is cleaned up. Meanwhile, some research groups are testing fully synthetic in the ocean.

The fantasy of a robot army doesn鈥檛 have to mean humanoid soldiers conquering enemies. Another future is always possible. Tiny algae-cyborg swarms could one day live inside your body 鈥� briefly 鈥� or travel in packs through the environment, decontaminating the messes that humanity made.

Right now, I鈥檓 glued to my phone. Like most people in the US, I get my news from various apps 鈥� social posts, podcasts, newsletters 鈥� and when things are blowing up (literally) I can鈥檛 look away. People in Minneapolis are posting video updates from protests; experts are publishing essays about international law and the US attack on Venezuela. I have to consume them all! The weirdest part, though, is that the more I watch and read what other people are saying, the lonelier I feel.

This is hardly a new or unique experience. Sociologists have been talking about it for nearly 80 years. In 1950, scholars David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published a book called , in which they argued that the rise of consumerism and mass media had led to a new kind of personality type that is deeply sensitive to loneliness. They called this personality 鈥渙ther-directed鈥�, and their descriptions feel startlingly prescient in our era of social media and AI chatbots.

Other-directed people are constantly attuned to what everyone around them is doing, using the preferences of their peer groups to decide what to buy, wear and think. Because their values come from peers, rather than elders or ancestors, they tend to be present-oriented and unconcerned with history. Riesman and his colleagues warned that other-directed people are obsessed with conforming, anxious to be 鈥減art of a crowd鈥� and 鈥渉aving fun鈥�. What other-directed people fear more than anything is being alone.

All of these personality traits are immediately recognisable to people dealing with social media, with its peer pressure, parasocial relationships with influencers and 鈥� especially these days 鈥� surveillance capabilities. We are always watching each other and being watched. And because we fear being alone, companies produce apps designed to fool us into thinking we aren鈥檛. That鈥檚 one of the insidious things about AI chatbots, some of which are to act like friends.

When we cobble ourselves together out of what we think other people want, we hide from something crucial

There鈥檚 a paradox in every other-directed person鈥檚 heart. As much as we may want to conform, to be part of the group chat, we also want to feel like we are unique. Riesman and his colleagues explained that consumerism itself assuages this other-directed anxiety by offering 鈥渇alse personalisation鈥�. You experience this when you find yourself choosing between six virtually identical polo shirts at the store. Picking one might make you feel that there鈥檚 a special brand out there just for you, but, fundamentally, all those shirts are the same. You wind up wearing a polo shirt just like everybody else.

This kind of false personalisation shows up all the time in the algorithms that shape our experiences online. TikTok and other apps have a 鈥渇or you鈥� feed full of videos that feel tailor-made for your specific tastes. And yet it is shaped by an algorithm that you don鈥檛 control, whose purpose is largely to keep your eyeballs glued to the same app that everyone else is glued to. It is 鈥渇or you鈥� in the service of conformity.

As other-directed people, we are invited to express ourselves mainly by participating in peer groups or by 鈥渏oining the conversation鈥�, as so many ads suggest. We turn ourselves into internet content, adding our words and videos to the morass of others online. Be yourself by showing that you are doing what everybody else is doing!

And yet we still feel lonely. Partly that鈥檚 because in-person friendships and communities are fundamentally different from online ones. But something else is going on here, and I think it has to do with the personality shifts chronicled in The Lonely Crowd. When we cobble ourselves together out of what we think other people want, we hide from something crucial: our own truly personal, messy, eccentric, non-conformist desires. We can鈥檛 connect with other people in a genuine way if we don鈥檛 know ourselves.

Riesman and his co-authors suggested two solutions to this other-directed problem. First, we need to take back our leisure hours from the hyper-consumerist sphere of media. All that effort we put into paying attention to our peers is too much like work, they argued, and we need more free play. Which brings me to their second suggestion, which is that people 鈥� and especially kids 鈥� should test out new identities and experiences. Figure out what you enjoy when nobody is telling you what 鈥渇un鈥� is supposed to be. Do something you have never done before. Wear something dramatic or silly. Strike up a conversation with a neighbour you have never met. Surprise yourself. And see how it feels to just鈥� experiment.

You won鈥檛 figure out who you are from a 鈥渇or you鈥� feed or a chatbot. So get off your phone, do something unexpected and be yourself for a while.

听

What I鈥檓 reading
Notes From a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman, a fantastical tale of rebellion and family drama.

What I鈥檓 watching
Heated Rivalry, because I know how to have fun.

What I鈥檓 working on
Researching Sogdiana, my favourite ancient diaspora culture.

听

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is

We are approaching the Gregorian New Year, and it鈥檚 a great time to ponder what鈥檚 coming next. Are we about to use CRISPR to grow wings? Will we all be uploading our brains to the Amazon cloud? Should we wrap the sun in a Dyson sphere? If, like me, you are a nerd who loves science and engineering, sci-fi is the place you turn to imagine the answers. The problem is that most people are getting the wrong messages from these visions of tomorrow.

As a science journalist who also writes science fiction, I am giving you an end-of-year present: a quick guide to not misreading sci-fi stories. Pay attention, because all our civilisations depend on it.

There are two main ways that people misread sci-fi. Let鈥檚 start with the simpler one, known as the Torment Nexus Problem. It appears most often in tech conferences and business plans, and gets its name from an iconic social media post by the satirist Alex Blechman. In 2021, he :

鈥淪ci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don鈥檛 Create The Torment Nexus鈥�.

You get the idea. The Torment Nexus Problem crops up when people read, watch or play a sci-fi story and focus on its futuristic tech without paying attention to the actual point of the story.

As a result, you get billionaire Peter Thiel co-founding a company that in data and surveillance called Palantir, named after the fantasy tech of the 鈥渟eeing stones鈥� in The Lord of the Rings that drive their users to evil and madness. Palantir鈥檚 products have been used by the Israel Defense Forces to strike targets in Gaza. Earlier this year, the firm signed a contract with the US government to build a system for tracking the movements of certain migrants. J. R. R. Tolkien would not be amused.

There are less disturbing examples as well. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to pivot Facebook to virtual reality, he renamed it Meta, after the metaverse in Neal Stephenson鈥檚 Snow Crash. But this fictional metaverse isn鈥檛 something you would want to emulate, if you paid attention when reading the story. It鈥檚 a hostile corporate space that unleashes a mind virus that causes people鈥檚 brains to 鈥渃rash鈥� like computers.

Zuckerberg and Thiel overlooked the fact that a palantir and the metaverse destroy people's minds

You might be sensing a theme here. Thiel and Zuckerberg wanted to make fictional tech real and appear to have overlooked the fact that a palantir and the metaverse destroy people鈥檚 minds. That鈥檚 a profound misreading of sci-fi.

The second major way people misread science fiction could be called the Blueprint Problem. Essentially, it鈥檚 the mistaken idea that sci-fi provides an exact model for what is coming next and if we replicate what happens in sci-fi, we will arrive in a glorious future.

The Blueprint Problem inspired a lot of early space programmes in the 1950s, which prioritised putting humans into space rather than exploring it remotely with robotic spacecraft. Generations of people had watched Flash Gordon and read Edgar Rice Burroughs, and had been promised that people would fly spaceships to colonise alien worlds. Today, we have robots discovering incredible things on Mars and space probes grabbing chunks of asteroids for analysis. But the media are still more likely to make a fuss over riding in Jeff Bezos鈥檚 rocket than to celebrate when the autonomous Voyager spacecrafts shock that marks the edge of our solar system.

Most of the hype around AI products can also be blamed on the Blueprint Problem. We were promised AI servants and savants in so much sci-fi over the past century that robocops and holographic doctors have come to feel inevitable. But they aren鈥檛.

Science fiction isn鈥檛 a map, a recipe book or a prescription. Instead, it is a world view, a way of approaching problems with the underlying assumption that things don鈥檛 have to be the way they are. This conviction inspired the book , a sci-fi anthology about social change that I co-edited with Karen Lord and Malka Older. We collected stories and essays intended to dislodge people鈥檚 preconceptions about where human civilisations are headed. In our book, the future isn鈥檛 predestined; it鈥檚 a process, and people are actively shaping it.

The more you appreciate this process, the weirder the present-day world starts to seem. Why do we build machines to fold tissues into boxes? Why do we believe in invisible lines called borders? Why do we assume there are only two immutable genders? Asking those kinds of questions is the real point of science fiction. They are the gateways to new worlds.

If you want to build a better future, you cannot merely replicate something you read. You must imagine it yourself.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is

What I鈥檓 reading
404 Media, an incredible online publication for investigative journalism about tech.

What I鈥檓 watching
Heated Rivalry, a gay ice hockey romance series that is extremely Canadian.

What I鈥檓 working on
Planning the European tour for sci-fi anthology We Will Rise Again.