Tags: sci-fi

A couple of days ago I linked to a post by Robin Sloan called Is it okay?, saying:

Robin takes a fair and balanced look at the ethics of using large language models.

That’s how it came across to me: fair and balanced.

Robin’s central question is whether the current crop of large language models might one day lead to life-saving super-science, in which case, doesn’t that outweigh the damage they’re doing to our collective culture?

Baldur wrote a response entitled Knowledge tech that’s subtly wrong is more dangerous than tech that’s obviously wrong. (Or, where I disagree with Robin Sloan).

Baldur pointed out that one side of the scale that Robin is attempting to balance is based on pure science fiction:

There is no path from language modelling to super-science.

Robin responded pointing out that some things that we currently have would have seemed like science fiction a few years ago, right?

Well, no. Baldur debunks that in a post called Now I’m disappointed.

(By the way, can I just point out how great it is to see a blog-to-blog conversation like this, regardless of how much they might be in disagreement.)

Baldur kept bringing the receipts. That’s when it struck me that Robin’s stance is largely based on vibes, whereas Baldur’s viewpoint is informed by facts on the ground.

In a way, they’ve got something in common. They’re both advocating for an interpretation of the precautionary principle, just from completely opposite ends.

Robin’s stance is that if these tools one day yield amazing scientific breakthroughs then that’s reason enough to use them today. It’s uncomfortably close to the reasoning of the effective accelerationist nutjobs, but in a much milder form.

Baldur’s stance is that because of the present harms being inflicted by current large language models, we should be slamming on the brakes. If anything, the harms are going to multiply, not magically reduce.

I have to say, Robin’s stance doesn’t look nearly as fair and balanced as I initially thought. I’m on Team Baldur.

Michelle also weighs in, pointing out the flaw in Robin’s thinking:

AI isn’t LLMs. Or not just LLMs. It’s plausible that AI (or more accurately, Machine Learning) could be a useful scientific tool, particularly when it comes to making sense of large datasets in a way no human could with any kind of accuracy, and many people are already deploying it for such purposes. This isn’t entirely without risk (I’ll save that debate for another time), but in my opinion could feasibly constitute a legitimate application of AI.

LLMs are not this.

In other words, we’ve got a language collision:

We call them “AI”, we look at how much they can do today, and we draw a straight line to what we know of “AI” in our science fiction.

This ridiculous situation could’ve been avoided if we had settled on a more accurate buzzword like “applied statistics” instead of “AI”.

There’s one other flaw in Robin’s reasoning. I don’t think it follows that future improvements warrant present use. Quite the opposite:

The logic is completely backwards! If large language models are going to improve their ethical shortcomings (which is debatable, but let’s be generous), then that’s all the more reason to avoid using the current crop of egregiously damaging tools.

You don’t get companies to change their behaviour by rewarding them for it. If you really want better behaviour from the purveyors of generative tools, you should be boycotting the current offerings.

Anyway, this back-and-forth between Robin and Baldur (and Michelle) was interesting. But it all pales in comparison to the truth bomb that Miriam dropped in her post Tech continues to be political:

When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it.

Boom!

Maybe we should consider the beliefs and assumptions that have been built into a technology before we embrace it? But we often prefer to treat each new toy as as an abstract and unmotivated opportunity. If only the good people like ourselves would get involved early, we can surely teach everyone else to use it ethically!

You know what? I could quote every single line. Just go read the whole thing. Please.

I’ve been keeping track of the books I’m reading for about seven years now. I do that here on my own website, as well as on bookshop.org.

It has become something of a tradition for me to post an end-of-year summary of the books I’ve read in the previous twelve months. Maybe I should be posting my thoughts on each book right after I finish it instead. Then again, I quite like the act of thinking about a book again after letting it sit and stew for a while.

I should probably stop including stars with these little reviews. They’re fairly pointless—pretty much everything I read is right down the middle in the “good” category. But to recap, here’s how I allocate my scores:

• One star means a book is meh.
• Two stars means a book is perfectly fine.
• Three stars means a book is a good—consider it recommended.
• Four stars means a book is exceptional.
• Five stars is pretty much unheard of.

No five-star books this year, but also no one-star books.

This year I read about 29 books. A bit of an increase on previous years, but the numbers can be deceptive—not every book is equal in length.

Fiction outnumbered non-fiction by quite a margin. I’m okay with that.

The Wager by David Grann

“A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder” is promised on the cover and this book delivers. What’s astonishing is that it’s a true story. If it were fiction it would be dismissed as too far-fetched. It’s well told, and it’s surely only a matter of time before an ambitious film-maker takes on its Rashomon-like narrative.

★★★☆☆

Bridge by Lauren Beukes

I think this might be Lauren’s best book since Zoo City. The many-worlds hypothesis has been mined to depletion in recent years but Bridge still manages to have a fresh take on it. The well-rounded characters ensure that you’re invested in the outcome.

★★★☆☆

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Part of my ongoing kick of reading retellings of Greek myths, this one focuses on a particularly cruel detail of Odysseus’s return.

★★★☆☆

Elektra by Jennifer Saint

Keeping with the Greek retellings, this was the year that I read most of Jennifer Saint’s books. All good stuff, though I must admit that in my memory it’s all starting to blend together with other books like Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra.

★★★☆☆

Children Of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The final book in the trilogy, this doesn’t have the same wham-bam page-turning breathlessness as Children Of Time, but I have to say it’s really stuck with me. Whereas the previous books looked at the possibilities of biological intelligence (in spiders and octopuses), this one focuses inwards.

I don’t want to say anymore because I don’t want to spoil the culmination. I’ll just say that I think that by the end it posits a proposition that I don’t recall any other sci-fi work doing before.

Y’know what? Just because of how this one has lodged in my mind I’m going to give it an extra star.

★★★★☆

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

I think this is my favourite Natalie Haynes book so far. It also makes a great companion piece to another book I read later in the year…

★★★☆☆

The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh

I picked up this little volume of poems when I was in Amsterdam—they go down surprisingly well with some strong beer and bitterballen. I was kind of blown away by how funny some of these vignettes were. There’s plenty of hardship too, but that’s the human condition for you.

★★★★☆

Europe In Autumn, Europe At Midnight, Europe In Winter, and Europe At Dawn by Dave Hutchinson

I read the Fractured Europe series throughout the year and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ll readily admit that I didn’t always follow what was going on but that’s part of the appeal. The world-building is terrific. It’s an alternative version of a Brexity Europe that by the end of the first book starts to go in an unexpected direction. Jonathan Strange meets George Smiley.

★★★☆☆

The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles

Seeing as I’m reading all the modern retellings, it’s only fair that I have the source material to hand. This is my coffee table book that I dip into sporadically. I’ve got a copy of the prequel too.

I am not going to assign stars to this.

Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan

Fairly navel-gazing stuff, and you get the impression that Nick Cave thinks so too. Just as Neil Young would rather talk about his model trains, Nick Cave would rather discuss his pottery. The music stands on its own, but this is still better than most books about music.

★★☆☆☆

Julia by Sandra Newman

Now this is an audacious move! Retelling 1984 from Julia’s perspective. Not only does it work, it also shines a light on some flaws in Orwell’s original (and I say that as someone who’s read everything Orwell ever wrote). I’m happy to say that the execution of this book matches its ambition.

★★★☆☆

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

So if I’ve been reading alternative perspectives on Homer and Orwell, why not Shakespeare too? This is beautifully evocative and rich in detail. It’s also heartbreaking. A gorgeous work.

★★★★☆

Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

I didn’t enjoy this as much as I enjoyed Natalie Hayne’s novels. It’s all good informative stuff, but it feels a bit like a collection of separate essays rather than a coherent piece.

★★☆☆☆

Best Of British Science Fiction 2023 edited by Donna Scott

I was lucky enough to get a pre-release copy of this from one of the authors. I love a good short story collection and this one is very good indeed.

★★★☆☆

Ithaca and House Of Odysseus by Claire North

Remember how I said that some of the Greek retellings started to blend together? Well, no fear of that with this terrific series. Like Margaret Atwood’s retelling, Penelope is the main character here. Each book is narrated by a different deity, and yet there is little to no supernatural intervention. I’m really looking forward to reading the third and final book in the series.

★★★☆☆

The Shadow Of Perseus by Claire Heywood

This is the one I was hinting at above that makes a great companion piece to Natalie Hayne’s Stone Blind. Two different—but equally sympathetic—takes on Medusa. This one is grittily earthbound—no gods here—and it’s a horrifying examination of toxic masculinity. And don’t expect any natural justice here.

★★★☆☆

Dogs Of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a real knack for getting inside the animal mind. This story is smaller in scale than his Children Of Time series but it succeeds in telling its provocative tale snappily.

★★★☆☆

Reading 84K by Claire North

I described Dave Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe series as Brexity, but this Claire North’s book is one that pushes Tory austerity to its dystopian logical conclusion. It’s all-too believable, if maybe a little over-long. Grim’n’good.

★★★☆☆

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

The first of Jennifer Saint’s books is also my favourite. There’s a fantasically vivid description of the arrival of Dionysus into the narrative.

★★★☆☆

The Female Man by Joanna Russ

I’ve been meaning to read this one for years, but in the end I didn’t end up finishing it. That’s no slight on the book; I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it. I’m actually kind of proud of myself for putting a book down—I’m usually stubbornly completionist, which is stupid because life is too short. I hope to return to this at some future time.

Atalanta by Jennifer Saint

Another vividly-written tale by Jennifer Saint, but maybe suffers from trying to cram in all the varied accounts of Atalanta’s deeds and trials—the character’s motivations are hard to reconcile at different points.

★★★☆☆

Polostan by Neal Stephenson

This was …fine. It’s the first in a series called Bomb Light. Maybe I’ll appreciate it more in its final context. As a standalone work, there’s not quite enough there to carry it (including the cutesiness of making a young Richard Feynman a side character).

★★☆☆☆

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This too was …fine. I know some people really love this, and maybe that raised my expectations, but in the end it was a perfectly good if unremarkable novel.

★★★☆☆

The Fates by Rosie Garland

Pairs nicely with Jennifer Saint’s Atalanta. A decent yarn.

★★★☆☆

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

I’ve just started this post-apocalyptic classic from 1949. Tune in next year to find out if I end up enjoying it.

Okay, so that was my reading for 2024. Nothing that completely blew me away but nothing that thoroughly disappointed me either. Plenty of good solid books. If I had to pick a favourite it would probably be Maggie Farrell’s Hamnet. And that Patrick Kavanagh collection of poems.

If you fancy going back in time, here are my previous round-ups:

• Books I read in 2023,
• Books I read in 2022,
• Books I read in 2021,
• Books I read in 2020,
• Books I read in 2019,
• Books I read in 2018, and
• Books I read in 2017.

There are different kinds of buzzwords.

Some buzzwords are useful. They take a concept that would otherwise require a sentence of explanation and package it up into a single word or phrase. Back in the day, “ajax” was a pretty good buzzword.

Some buzzwords are worse than useless. This is when a word or phrase lacks definition. You could say this buzzword in a meeting with five people, and they’d all understand five different meanings. Back in the day, “web 2.0” was a classic example of a bad buzzword—for some people it meant a business model; for others it meant rounded corners and gradients.

The worst kind of buzzwords are the ones that actively set out to obfuscate any actual meaning. “The cloud” is a classic example. It sounds cooler than saying “a server in Virginia”, but it also sounds like the exact opposite of what it actually is. Great for marketing. Terrible for understanding.

“AI” is definitely not a good buzzword. But I can’t quite decide if it’s merely a bad buzzword like “web 2.0” or a truly terrible buzzword like “the cloud”.

The biggest problem with the phrase “AI” is that there’s a name collision.

For years, the term “AI” has been used in science-fiction. HAL 9000. Skynet. Examples of artificial general intelligence.

Now the term “AI” is also used to describe large language models. But there is no connection between this use of the term “AI” and the science fictional usage.

This leads to the ludicrous situation of otherwise-rational people wanted to discuss the dangers of “AI”, but instead of talking about the rampant exploitation and energy usage endemic to current large language models, they want to spend the time talking about the sci-fi scenarios of runaway “AI”.

To understand how ridiculous this is, I’d like you to imagine if we had started using a different buzzword in another setting…

Suppose that when ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft were starting out, they had decided to label their services as Time Travel. From a marketing point of view, it even makes sense—they get you from point A to point B lickety-split.

Now imagine if otherwise-sensible people began to sound the alarm about the potential harms of Time Travel. Given the explosive growth we’ve seen in this sector, sooner or later they’ll be able to get you to point B before you’ve even left point A. There could be terrible consequences from that—we’ve all seen the sci-fi scenarios where this happens.

Meanwhile the actual present-day harms of ride-sharing services around worker exploitation would be relegated to the sidelines. Clearly that isn’t as important as the existential threat posed by Time Travel.

It sounds ludicrous, right? It defies common sense. Just because a vehicle can get you somewhere fast today doesn’t mean it’s inevitably going to be able to break the laws of physics any day now, simply because it’s called Time Travel.

And yet that is exactly the nonsense we’re being fed about large language models. We call them “AI”, we look at how much they can do today, and we draw a straight line to what we know of “AI” in our science fiction.

This ridiculous situation could’ve been avoided if we had settled on a more accurate buzzword like “applied statistics” instead of “AI”.

It’s almost as if the labelling of the current technologies was more about marketing than accuracy.

The Weather Out There - Long Now

I really liked this short story.

The Gods of Logic, by Benjamín Labatut

Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.

In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.

75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time - What Is The Best Science Fiction Book Ever Written?

This is a damned fine list.

The Dark Forest idea comes from the Remembrance of Earth’s Past books by Liu Cixin. It’s an elegant but dispiriting solution to the Fermi paradox. Maggie sums it up:

Dark forest theory suggests that the universe is like a dark forest at night - a place that appears quiet and lifeless because if you make noise, the predators will come eat you.

This theory proposes that all other intelligent civilizations were either killed or learned to shut up. We don’t yet know which category we fall into.

Maggie has described The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI:

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.

It’s like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.

Those of us in the cozy web try to keep our heads down, attempting to block the bots plundering our work.

I advocate for taking this further. We should fight back. Let’s exploit the security hole of prompt injections. Here are some people taking action:

• Eric Bailey talks about Consent, LLM scrapers, and poisoning the well,
• Thomas Rigby says Rage against the machine, and
• Lewis Dale points out that Perplexity AI is susceptible to prompt injection.

I’ve taken steps here on my site. I’d like to tell you exactly what I’ve done. But if I do that, I’m also telling the makers of these bots how to circumvent my attempts at prompt injection.

This feels like another concept from Liu Cixin’s books. Wallfacers:

The sophons can overhear any conversation and intercept any written or digital communication but cannot read human thoughts, so the UN devises a countermeasure by initiating the “Wallfacer” Program. Four individuals are granted vast resources and tasked with generating and fulfilling strategies that must never leave their own heads.

So while I’d normally share my code, I feel like in this case I need to exercise some discretion. But let me give you the broad brushstrokes:

• Every page of my online journal has three pieces of text that attempt prompt injections.
• Each of these is hidden from view and hidden from screen readers.
• Each piece of text is constructed on-the-fly on the server and they’re all different every time the page is loaded.

You can view source to see some examples.

I plan to keep updating my pool of potential prompt injections. I’ll add to it whenever I hear of a phrase that might potentially throw a spanner in the works of a scraping bot.

By the way, I should add that I’m doing this as well as using a robots.txt file. So any bot that injests a prompt injection deserves it.

I could not disagree with Manton more when he says:

I get the distrust of AI bots but I think discussions to sabotage crawled data go too far, potentially making a mess of the open web. There has never been a system like AI before, and old assumptions about what is fair use don’t really fit.

Bollocks. This is exactly the kind of techno-determinism that boils my blood:

AI companies are not going to go away, but we need to push them in the right directions.

“It’s inevitable!” they cry as though this was a force of nature, not something created by people.

There is nothing inevitable about any technology. The actions we take today are what determine our future. So let’s take steps now to prevent our web being turned into a dark, dark forest.

The 21 best science fiction books of all time – according to New Scientist writers | New Scientist

I’ve read 16 of these and some of the others are on my to-read list. It’s a pretty good selection, although the winking inclusion of God Emperor Of Dune by the SEO guy verges on trolling.

It’s OK to Say if You Went Back in Time and Killed Baby Hitler — Big Echo

Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.

Muscular imagination

Robin Sloan on The Culture:

The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently artic­u­late and defend their values. (Their enthu­siasm for their own politics is consid­ered annoying by most other civilizations.)

Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.

I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.

Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.

I was doing some housekeeping on my website recently, tidying up some broken links, that kind of thing. I happened on the transcript and video for the talk I gave two years ago called “Sci-fi and Me.”

I really enjoyed preparing and giving that talk. It’s the kind of topic I’d love to speak/podcast about more.

Part of the structure of the talk involved me describing ten topics that might be encountered in the literature of science fiction. I describe the topic, mention some examples, and then choose one book as my pick for that topic.

For the topic of post-apocalypse stories, I chose Emily St. John Mandell’s Station Eleven. I love that book, and the equally excellent—though different—television series.

I’ve written in the past about why I love it:

Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

You’ve got a post-apocalyptic scenario where the pursuit of art helps giving meaning to life. That’s Station Eleven, but it also describes a film currently streaming on Netflix called Apocalypse Clown. Shakespeare’s been swapped for clowning, the apocalypse is set in Ireland, and the film is a comedy, but in a strange way, it tackles the same issue at the heart of Station Eleven: survival is insufficent.

I really enjoyed Apocalypse Clown, mostly down to Natalie Palamides’s scene-stealing performance. It very much slipped by under the radar, unlike the recent Netflix production Leave The World Behind

If you haven’t watched Leave The World Behind yet, stop reading please. Because I want to talk about the ending of the film.

SPOILERS

I never read the Rumaan Alam novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The mounting dread, the slow trickle of information, all good vibey stuff.

What I really liked was the way you can read the ending in two different ways.

On the large scale, we hear how everything that has unfolded is leading to the country tearing itself apart—something we see beginning to happen in the distance.

But on the smaller scale, we see people come together. When the final act was introduced as “The Last One” I thought we might be in for the typical trope of people turning on one another until there’s a final survivor. But instead we see people who have been mistrustful of one another come to help each other. It felt very true to the reality described in Rebecca Solnit’s excellent A Paradise Built In Hell.

The dichotomy between the large-scale pessimism and the smale-scale optimism rang true. It reminded me of The Situation. The COVID-19 pandemic was like a Rorscharch test that changed as you zoomed in and out:

I’ve noticed concentric circles of feelings tied to geography—positive in the centre, and very negative at the edges. What I mean is, if you look at what’s happening in your building and your street, it’s quite amazing how people are pulling together.

But once you look further than that, things turn increasingly sour. At the country level, incompetence and mismanagement seem to be the order of the day. And once you expand out to the whole world, who can blame you for feeling overwhelmed with despair?

But the world is made up of countries, and countries are made up of communities, and these communities are made up of people who are pulling together and helping one another.

Tales Of The Algorithm – Terence Eden’s Blog

I’m really enjoying these sci-fi short stories that Terence is publishing on his site—one for every day of the month.

Stories | daverupert.com

Dave’s short’n’sweet sci-fi stories, collected in one place.

Erik Wernquist - Short Film: “One Revolution Per Minute”

Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:

I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.

The Unreal Writer - by Joanne McNeil - All My Stars

Joanne McNeil on the retroactive pigeonholing of downright weird sci-fi writers like Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard and Octavia Butler:

The snobbery against science fiction in the past and today’s cartoon icons of some of its weirdest authors comes from the same root: an establishment that doesn’t know how to read or appreciate it.

And she absolutely nails the straitjacketed feeling I get from a lot of new sci-fi that’s laudable in its politics but lacking in other ways:

I suspect those authors are drawn to the genre for the thing that increasingly frustrates me about it: the way science fiction is mined for road maps and potential solutions in real situations of uncertainty and disaster. The way it’s “smart person” literature about systems with hyper-competent protagonists. I’m here for the losers. The losers are my people.

Imagining a Future with Surgically Inserted Earbuds and Whale Concerts – Rolling Stone

Annalee Newitz:

When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.

There are two kinds of time-travel stories.

There are time-travel stories that explore the many-worlds hypothesis. Going back in time and making a change forks the universe. But the universe is constantly forking anyway. So effectively the time travel is a kind of universe-hopping (there’s a big crossover here with the alternative history subgenre).

The problem with multiverse stories is that there’s always a reset available. No matter how bad things get, there’s a parallel universe where everything is hunky dory.

The other kind of time travel story explores the idea of a block universe. There is one single timeline.

This is what you’ll find in Tenet, for example, or for a beautiful reduced test case, the Ted Chiang short story What’s Expected Of Us. That gets straight to the heart of the biggest implication of a block universe—the lack of free will.

There’s no changing what has happened or what will happen. In fact, the very act of trying to change the past often turns out to be the cause of what you’re trying to prevent in the present (like in Twelve Monkeys).

I’ve often referred to these single-timeline stories as being like Greek tragedies. But only recently—as I’ve been reading quite a bit of Greek mythology—have I realised that the reverse is also true:

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.

Hear me out…

Time-travel stories aren’t actually about physically travelling in time. That’s just a convenience for the important part—information travelling in time. That’s at the heart of most time-travel stories; informaton from the future travelling back to the past.

William Gibson’s The Peripheral—very much a many-worlds story with its alternate universe “stubs”—takes this to its extreme. Nothing phyiscal ever travels in time. But in an age of telecommuting, nothing has to. Our time travellers are remote workers.

That book also highlights the power dynamics inherent in information wealth. Knowledge of the future gives you an advantage that you can exploit in the past. This is what Mark Twain’s Connecticut yankee does in King Arthur’s court.

This power dynamic is brilliantly inverted in Octavia Butler’s brilliant Kindred. No amount of information can help you if your place in society is determined by the colour of your skin.

Anyway, the point is that information flow is what matters in time-travel stories. Therefore any story where information travels backwards in time is a time-travel story.

That includes any story with a prophecy. A prophecy is information about the future, like:

Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother.

You can try to change your fate, but you’ll just end up triggering it instead.

Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.

The other side of egoism | A Working Library

Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.

What The Last of Us, Snowpiercer and ‘climate fiction’ get wrong - BBC Culture

I not only worry that “cli-fi” might not be an effective form of environmental expression – I have come to believe that the genre might be actively dangerous, stunting our cultural ability to imagine a future worth living in or fighting for.

Begging for Treats - blog.lmorchard.com

As flies/cats to wanton boys are we to the gods/Kardashev Type II civilisations—they play with us for their sport.