How Science Fiction Made the Modern World

The Tech Imaginarium, hosted by L&D broadcaster John Helmer with co-host and subject expert Ezri Carlebach, takes its first season on a six-episode tour through the ideas, inventions and imaginings that turned speculative fiction into technological reality. From Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; from Hugo Gernsback's pulp dreams to artificial intelligence — the series argues that science, technology and imagination are constantly feeding each other. 

The opening episode, Amazing Stories is 100, marks the centenary of Amazing Stories, the magazine widely regarded as the founding publication of the modern science fiction genre. Launched by Hugo Gernsback in April 1926, it was the first periodical anywhere in the world devoted entirely to science fiction. Episode 1 also explores the cultural moment of the magazine's arrival — a world of new radio networks, of Einstein and Schrödinger remaking the laws of physics, and of Robert Goddard testing the rockets that would eventually take humanity into space, partly because he had been inspired as a teenager by H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.

Co-host Ezri Carlebach said: "From the launch of Amazing Stories, science fiction began to gain its reputation as 'the literature of ideas,' as Isaac Asimov called it. Its unique character is based on the 'what if' framing of its ideas, as well as its core themes — the development and use of technology, the future as the primary orientation of human thought, and the potential evolution of humanity, or in many cases, its potential destruction.”

John Helmer said: "Science fiction predicted most of what I've seen happen in learning technologies, a field I've worked in since 1999, and a lot else besides. As we grapple with the impact of a technology like AI on our lives, these stories give us ways to think about the huge benefits to mankind it promises – as well as the darker fears its creations inspire."