The Surrogates is a 2005 comic series that explored a future society where humans control robots from the comfort and safety of their own homes. These robots provide what appears to be perfect telepresence by connecting the owners to the outside world - without risk to their physical bodies.

The series was made into a motion picture in 2009, titled Surrogates, with a slightly altered storyline in which humans can be killed through through the Surrogate interface. In both works, investigators (police in the graphic novels and FBI agents in the film) attempt to solve a series of crimes involving attacks on surrogates, with the investigation taking them deep into societal issues between a modern world and a militant group who refuses to interact with surrogates.

They are both engaging stories exploring extreme telepresence and the positives and negatives that come with the technology. The graphic novels are thoughtful and very well written with a lot of believability. The film is science fiction as an action film, though Surrogates takes time to explore additional elements not included in the graphic novels, adding to the plot and in the background of the main storyline. It's an intelligent movie behind the gunshots and car chases.

Factory Fifteen makes visually stunning short films and 'Gamma' is no exception. The story is set after nuclear wars have left some cities irradiated husks. Gamma is a product designed to clean the cities and make them habitable again. An artificial lifeform made from fungi and molluscs, the Gamma spores are seeded via floating ships and promise to make the cities safe within months. Sadly, this doesn't happen and we hear the narrator tell the tale of his home's fate.

Six and a half minutes long, 'Gamma' is worth a quick watch. It touches on issues surrounding modified life and what happens when they don't live up to the hype.

It's 2047, a hundred years after India gained independence from Britain, River of Gods is set in a country now broken into smaller nations. There hasn't been a monsoon season in years, resulting in a parched region with a Ganges trickling through Varanasi after being dammed upstream - a dam that has two nations on the edge of war.

The world is a different place in 2047. Genetic modification is everywhere, including superchildren and gender neutralizing body modifications. Artificial intelligence operates at different levels, some of them above the limits banned by international treaty. Otherwise, much of India is still poor, water is even more scarce, and the caste system carries on with only a few adjustments.

However, the Americans have found something deep in space. An object that causes a lot of questions and sends a specialist in search of her former lover. In India, someone else finds him first, someone with a strange past and who might not be completely human. Meanwhile, Mr. Nandha, one of the Krishna Cops, is hunting aeai's (artificial intelligence) with his team.

A winner of the British Science Fiction Association award and a nominee for both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Hugo Award, River of Gods is a wild ride through a futuristic Indian culture. The complexity of the story, presenting normal human lives and emotions intertwined with decades of advancements, presents a believable backdrop against which events unfold.

According to Wikipedia, Alex Pentland's areas of research include social physics, big data, and privacy. In his book, Social Physics, Pentland takes us through the benefits and issues, such as the loss of privacy, that come from comprehensive tracking. It's a short book with a deep look at how the Internet of Things and the quantified self will collect data to change the world around us and better our lives.

Focused on human behavior, the book offers a look at the range of benefits that could result from our hyperconnected world. These include idea flow to spread and advance new ideas, methods for bringing people into problem-solving scenarios to fast prototype solutions, and ways cities can take the density of its members, services, and infrastructure together to improve efficiency while providing the best living experience for the humans who call it home. At its heart, the work focuses on ways we can use data to find better methods for improving how we work together, but it also hints at the promise of an abundant future where mountains of data provide true insight to the best ways we can work together.

While that sounds promising, Pentland doesn't look at the world through rose colored glasses, but acknowledges how this data can and will impact our privacy. So he also proposes simple laws designed to allow the collection of data while protecting citizens from its inappropriate use (at least without our permission).

Social Physics is a course in a book by one of, if not THE expert in this field. Pentland offers a thorough and digestible look at the field and what it offers our future.

Theodore Twombly is an introvert going through divorce. After he purchases an operating system designed to be a virtual friend, Theodore become emotionally attached to 'Samantha' and enters into a romantic relationship with her. - her being the artificial intelligence in his computer. Her follows their relationship through the typical trials most human relationships go through, with the added issues of a virtual companion who attempts to satisfy their 'lover' through a variety of emotional and romantic experiences.

At its heart, Her is a relationship film set around two very different people, one made of code, attempting to find common ground. It explores the variety of their relationship from Theodore's viewpoint, though Samantha's growth and issues are also represented throughout the story. As the story unfolds and the relationship goes through its ups and downs, we get a sense of this new and fragile pairing.

Nominated for five Academy Awards, Her won best screenplay in addition to being nominated for best picture. With a laid back, futuristic setting and a story presented through conversation and emotion, Her isn't just science fiction, it's a brilliant look at a future where artificial intelligence, and also artificial emotion, impacts the individual.

The original "Planet of the Apes" introduced us to a world where humans are secondary to our closest family species in the great apes. The film relaunch of "Planet of the Apes" set those events in our future. "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" explains why these species are uplifted to human-level intelligence and the resulting conflict when humans attempt to deal with "alien" emotions, attitudes, and actions.

The film focuses on the development of an uplifted chimpanzee named Caeser, who gains human-level (or greater) intelligence as a result of the pharmaceutical testing of a potential Alzheimer's cure on his pregnant mother. Raised by the scientist who developed the cure, the film presents Caeser's life from a newborn to his role as a leader of a group of uplifted animals.

Eric Drexler introduced the world to nanotechnology in his first book, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. In his newest book, Radical Abundance, Drexler presents a range of information, informing the reader of the process of nanoscale manufacturing, current efforts and research (and hurdles), and the benefits to science, society, and the planet once we achieve the reality of nanoscale fabrication.

Drexler presents APM (atomically-precise manufacturing) as the next revolution, the first three being agriculture, industrial, and information. This revolution will be powered once we control "the molecular machinery of life (using) proteins that can fit together to form motors, sensors, structural frameworks, and catalytic devices..." By using natural systems to construct from the atomic level towards larger and more complex products, we can manufacture efficiently, using common chemical substances in place of minerals and metals acquired through ecologically damaging mining, and to create materials we cannot visualize today.

In Drexler's future, APM solves many of the societal issues that create poverty, ecological disasters, and conflict. It's an important work that gives us a future to look forward to when so many visions are broken and dystopian.

Considered one of cinema's most influential science fiction films, the Blade Runner screenplay was based on Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed sci fi classics Alien and Prometheus. Blade Runner is set in our near future, 2019 is only 5 years away, against a dystopian backdrop of a filthy, crowded, culturally mixed cityscape on a planet where most humans appear to have left for other colonies. As with most classics that visualized technological and ecological hell on the other side of the year 2000, the vision is not accurate. Yet, it navigates issues we are discussing today because they will be here tomorrow.

Gravity is a highly detailed action thriller set in Earth's orbit. Starting with a what should be a routine Hubble Space Telescope repair, the mission ends as events threaten the shuttle and astronauts. The movie spins the lead characters, of which there are two, through a series of attempts to survive in orbit while seeking a way back to Earth.

As genetic engineering progresses, humanity will be faced with issues of morality time and time again. Splice looks at the field of artificial life and the specific issue of combining human and non-human DNA. In the film, two researchers, facing the loss of their research, decide to combine human and animal DNA to create a new life form - just to prove it can be done. Once the birth occurs, each has a different response to the creature and those responses change over time as Dren develops towards adulthood.

The plot focuses on the different relationships Clive and Elsa have to the being they have birthed for science. Fearing their employer's response, they hide Dren and eventually mover her off site to protect her. Dren's development affects both scientists in different ways, with each responding to Dren and each other in different and sometimes horrific ways.

A Martian storm forces Mark Watney's crew to end their mission just a few days into their 31 days on Mars. Separated from his crew, Watney is left behind to find ways to survive with slim hope of a rescue. An engaging novel from page one, The Martian provides detailed engineering and scientific realities as Watney, a botanist and engineer, overcomes a range of issues in his quest to survive as the lone occupant of the planet.

I'll make no bones about it, The Martian is the best novel I've read in years. Weir picks up right at the beginning of Watney's realization his crew has abandoned him, and keeps you on the edge of your seat. In addition to Watney's perspective, he includes the workings and politics of NASA, and presents a world where all of Earth is rooting for one of our own stranded alone. Weaving it all together offers the reader a roller coaster full of science and engineering that will teach as much as it entertains.

A true sci-fi thriller, The Machine presents a future where artificial intelligence is closing in on human-level capabilities and governments race to develop human-like robotic soldiers. After a cold war with China has caused a severe economic depression in the West, research into artificial intelligence is viewed as THE research to win what is considered an unavoidable war. The desired outcome is a superior soldier capable of managing a "three-block war: the battle, the negotiations, and the peace."

While too many recent science fiction films have focused on famous actors and fast scenes, adding layers of action to cross genres, The Machine is a true sci-fi film (there is action, but most of the movie is slow and moody as developments take time). Both dark and gritty, it feels like a better view of the future than the ultra-political Elysium or any film dealing with human-alien strife. Swinging for the fence, Caradog James, writer and director of The Machine, bangs one out of the park.

Sometimes a great look at the future shows up in places you weren't looking. The Bourne Legacy, the sequel to the trilogy with Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye in the Avengers) taking the lead role, is a fast-paced look at posthumanism and one of the better futurist films I've watched in some time.

I'd mostly ignored Legacy, figuring it would eventually hit Netflix, but found it in the library on Blu-ray this week and picked it up. Finding some free time today, I started watching and was blown away as the back story came together piece by piece. Sometimes the best views of the future arrive in a medium other than science fiction.

Stop here if you don't want to read spoilers. But this is a great movie and worth checking out.

Ventus is one of those scifi novels that strikes a great balance between plot, characters and new technologies - and a few old ones. One of my favorites and it's free on his website (or you can donate something for a novel that offers both education and entertainment with 4 stars on Amazon and 4.6 on Manybooks) if you're looking for something to occupy your weekend until winter finally sails away.

Black Mirror is a brilliant 6-episode series, each depicting the social impact of new technologies or social advancement in the future. Showing on Britain's Channel 4, it can be a bit hard to watch in the States, but is worth every effort to see.

Warren Ellis introduced the Extremis concept to Iron man in a 6-issue story arc starting in January 2005. This arc changed Tony Stark from a cyborg to a posthuman by introducing nanotechnology into his body and altering his physiology to include direct connections with the Iron Man suit. Ellis introduced many concepts and characters that were used in the Iron Man movie trilogy, especially Iron Man 3.

If you're into superhero comics, this is a short arc you don't want to miss. It's available on Marvel Unlimited or through Amazon. In typical comic-book style, it takes some complex scientific breakthroughs and turn them into a magical elixir, yet it brings many of the reasons we research posthuman adaptation into perspective given Stark's need to deal with the story villains. And there are a few great conversations in which characters wax philosophical about their Frankensteinian need to create a future that might be more monster than they would like.