690 - Living and Writing in Sci-Fi Times
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you write science fiction when technology is moving so quickly? John and Craig welcome back journalist and screenwriter Max Read to look at the trickiness of predicting the future, how our imagined futures can affect our reality, and ways that writers can protect their work from becoming dated before it’s even released.
We also follow up on the new Dogma manifesto, words we don’t have in English, questioning ChatGPT, and answer listener questions on hosting your scripts on your website, offline writing software and how to find the time to goof around.
In our bonus segment for premium members, Max walks us through his Letterboxd lists and proposes a new, niche film genre.
Links:
- Max Read’s newsletter Read Max and his Letterboxd
- Dogma 25 Explodes at Cannes by Annika Pham, Marta Balaga for Variety
- Maze by Christopher Manson
- Blue Prince
- Graham’s source for Egypt’s GDP and John’s sources
- Neal Stephenson
- William Gibson
- Red Rooms
- This Strange Mutation Explains the Mystifying Color of Orange Cats by Gayoung Lee for Scientific American
- The Simulation is Failing. by Jessica Mazin
- r/OneOrangeBraincell
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at [email protected]
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome. My name is John August. |
| 0:04.0 | My name is Craig Mason. |
| 0:06.2 | And you're listening to Episode 690 of Script Notes. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. |
| 0:11.6 | Today on the show, science fiction has been a staple of cinema for more than a century. |
| 0:16.1 | Georges-gues gave us a trip to the moon way back in 1902. |
| 0:19.6 | But increasingly, to me at least, |
| 0:21.3 | it feels like it's getting harder to tell science fiction stories |
| 0:23.8 | because daily reality feels like science fiction. |
| 0:27.6 | We now have AI chatbots, lab grown meat, gene editing. |
| 0:31.6 | Scientists recently de-extrined the dire wolf, Craig. |
| 0:34.2 | How do you feel about that? |
| 0:35.4 | Great, because now I can unfurl my house banner. Yes, |
| 0:41.1 | House Mason. House Mason has its precious dire wolves back. But the bigger issue is how do we write |
| 0:46.7 | about what-if stories if these what-ifs are occurring on a daily basis? And even if we're not writing |
| 0:51.2 | science fiction, what will life look like when your rom-com comes out in |
| 0:54.6 | 2028? Well, it seemed hopelessly dated. So to help us wrestle with all these questions, we welcome |
| 0:58.9 | back a journalist and screenwriter whose newsletter, Read Max, I highly recommend. He also coined the term |
| 1:04.4 | halogen core, which we discussed back in episode 656. Welcome back, Max Reed. Thank you guys so much for |
| 1:10.3 | having me. It's exciting to have |
| 1:12.0 | you here. You read so much more science fiction than we do, and you seem like based on your |
| 1:15.7 | newsletter, I cannot believe the volume of material you read, but you also watch movies that we don't |
... |
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