Octopi societies, robot siblings, dark utopias: The latest from the worlds of sci-fi

A Wknd stock-taking finds sci-fi five years after the pandemic now dominated by AI, climate change, and dystopias set as close as 2095.

Authors like Ray Nayler (The Mountain in the Sea) explore super-intelligent octopi that reject humans, questioning assumptions about intelligence.

Stories feature robots demanding rights, gig economies as the only remaining economies, and colonized star systems with empathy.

Unlike pure classical utopias, modern tales include seas rising, capitalism survived, and handmade idyllic farms on distant moons.

Sci-fi today is described as predication—inferring outcomes of how technologies materially change what it means to be human.