Eliot Peper, Novelist

“What do citizenship and borders mean — what should they mean — in a globally networked world? How can we protect the legitimacy of our political institutions in the face of rampant digital disinformation and manipulation? Is global corporate power threatening national sovereignty, and is that a good or a bad thing? If the modern system of nation-states that has lasted for nearly half a millennium becomes a thing of the past, what system will replace it?”

These are a few of the questions that Kevin Bankston posed to Malka Older, Ada Palmer, and myself in a recent two-hour long interview. Bankston is the director of the Open Technology Institute, maintains an excellent science fiction newsletter, and has written about the feedback loop between science fiction and reality for publications like the Atlantic and Slate. Palmer and Older are two of my very favorite authors and I’ve previously recommended both of their books in my reading recommendation newsletter.

Needless to say, this conversation was a lot of fun and I think you’ll get a kick out of it. You can read the transcript or watch the full video here:

https://medium.com/@KevinBankston/three-amazing-sci-fi-writers-talk-about-the-future-of-tech-politics-privacy-climate-and-more-60295e39028f

Complement with this Medium feature on Bandwidth, this podcast interview about writing science fiction, and Malka Older on the future of democracy.