Fourteen hundred years before the Apollo missions, a Greek satirist put humans on the Moon. In Lucian of Samosata's True History, a ship gets caught in a whirlwind, and its crew are swept up into the sky, straight into a war between the Sun and the Moon. Lucian tells his readers, upfront, that every word of it is a lie. It might be the first known work of science fiction. It might be something else entirely.

This is not an AI podcast. It’s a podcast about centuries of stories that taught us what AI might be.

Writers Kelly Vero and Dave Bradley are joined by Tom Hunter, Director of the Arthur C Clarke Award, the UK's most prestigious prize for science fiction, to work out what actually counts as the genre, and whether that question even matters.

In your hour-long podcast episode:

• Would Lucian's True History be eligible for the Clarke Award today?

• Why so much early speculative fiction reaches for somewhere else entirely, the Moon, a parallel world, to talk about life here

• Margaret Cavendish, the 17th-century Duchess who wrote The Blazing World while London burned around her, and what changes when new voices start imagining other worlds

• Star Trek, Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale, and the case that genre labels matter less than what a story is actually doing

• Why judging science fiction by what it "predicted" misses the point of most of it

• The technology that exists because someone met it in fiction first

• Tom's rapid-fire verdicts: Clarke vs Asimov, the Moon vs Mars, and the greatest science-fiction novel to never win the Clarke Award...

Tom Hunter has directed the Arthur C Clarke Award since 2006 and is currently steering it through its 40th anniversary year, which drew a record number of submissions. This year’s Arthur C Clarke Award winner was When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift. Tom also runs his own marketing and communications consultancy.

Inspired by their book, Myth-Made Machines: The Stories Behind Artificial Intelligence (Bloomsbury, published September 2026), Kelly and Dave are on a mission to talk about depictions of artificial life and all the stories and philosophies that surround it. Check out the book: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/mythmade-machines-9798216370673/

Next time: Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, and a 300-year-old fictional machine that already looks uncomfortably like a chatbot.

Cover art is “The Ship Is Caught Up Into The Skies” by Alfred Payne Garnett from the 1899 edition of Lucian's Wonderland (Blackwood and Sons): https://elfinspell.com/ClassicalTexts/Lucian/Wonderland/Bk1Chap2.html