Each month, Future Tense Fiction will bring you a dramatic telling of a short story exploring how tech that's emerging today could dramatically reshape tomorrow. Science journalist Maddie Stone will then have a conversation with the author about what inspired their writing, and their vision of the future.
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Each month, Future Tense Fiction will bring you a dramatic telling of a short story exploring how tech that's emerging today could dramatically reshape tomorrow. Science journalist Maddie Stone will then have a conversation with the author about what inspired their writing, and their vision of the future.
On this month’s episode of Future Tense Fiction, host Maddie Stone talks to Matt Bell about his short story “Empathy Hour.”
In the story’s climate-change-ravaged future, society’s wealthiest are whisked away to luxurious, self-contained cities. Once there, they entertain themselves with a carefully crafted reality show meant to assuage their guilt about the climate refugees they’ve left behind. But then, someone breaks into their airbrushed world, lifting the lid on what hides underneath it.
After the story, Matt and Maddie discuss the promises and pitfalls of climate fiction–and why we want to feel empathy, but never too much.
Guest: Matt Bell is the author of several books, including the novel Appleseed, a New York Times Notable Book of 2021. He is a professor of creative writing at Arizona State University.
Story read by Josh Bloomberg
Podcast production by Tiara Darnell
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Future Tense Fiction
Each month, Future Tense Fiction will bring you a dramatic telling of a short story exploring how tech that's emerging today could dramatically reshape tomorrow. Science journalist Maddie Stone will then have a conversation with the author about what inspired their writing, and their vision of the future.
