The name “science fiction” is a pretty good descriptor of the genre, if you want to think of it as two big buckets for a writer to fill. Bucket 1: science! Fun tech and gizmos to entertain and inspire. Bucket 2: fiction! Narrative and story and other engaging ideas that make us laugh, cry, and consider what it means to be human. It’s amazing that one genre can bring us all that. But have you ever noticed some sci-fi does an incredible job of the “fi” part -- and thanks to that brilliant “fi”, we let a lot of weird “sci” whoosh right past us?

On this week’s episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by Dan Hopper (Cracked) and Moujan Zolfaghari (Mission To Zyxx) for a trip down memory lane, into the future, where everybody WISHES they had tech half as great as WiFi. They’ll examine everything from ‘Minority Report’ to ‘Blade Runner’ to all generations of ‘Star Trek’, finding gizmo after gizmo that’s lower-tech than what we have in real life, and dig into why sci-fi stories where things are supposed to be more advanced than today ignore the actual ways technology advances.

Footnotes: http://www.cracked.com/podcast/12-sci-fi-movie-technologies-that-went-stupidly-backwards/