This episode of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy is brought to you by Avatars Inc.

A new anthology edited by Anne Fandermeer, featuring stories by authors such as James S.Corry, Ken Lou, and Pat Cadigan.

Read all 24 stories for free right now over at avatars. Inc. so that's avatars

dot inc. Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr

Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 405 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Ross Douthit. He's an op-ed writer for the New York Times, a movie reviewer for National Review, and the author of non-fiction books such as Bad Religion, how he became a nation of heretics, and to change the church, Pope Francis and the future of Catholicism.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his new book, The Decident Society, which explores the way that humanity's

sci-fi future fell victim to cultural, political, and technological stagnation.

And today shows brought to you by Avatars Inc.

A new anthology edited by Ann Vandermeer, created by Eric Desotnick, and brought to you by X Prize and all Nippon Airways.

The book is said in a sci-fi future in which robotic avatar systems have explored the

furthest reaches of the solar system, and now an effort is being made to retrieve the memory cards from

those avatars and return them to Earth.

Each story in the anthology relates the contents of one of those memory cards and

together the stories paint a vivid picture of a 21st century future full of progress and adventure.

Aavatars Inc concludes fiction by authors such as James S.A. Corey,

Kenilu, Pat Kattigan, Charles U, Jeffrey Ford, Robert Reed, Paul Macaulay, and Aliette Bodard.

And you can read all 24 stories for free right now over at avatars.ink.

And if you want to join the adventure, you can also write your own story set in the

Avatars Inc universe. Avatars Inc will choose one winning story of

2,500 to 3,500 words to upload to their memory archive with the winner

...