The behind-the-scenes story of how Films from the Future came to be — from its unprintable original title to a box of books that may still be sitting in a Tesla storeroom
The book was not always called Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies.
The original working title — before Andrew had fully settled on what the book would become — was "The Moviegoer's Guide to Not Fucking Up The Future." This captured the spirit of the project perfectly: irreverent, direct, with a nod to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and a clear sense of what was at stake. It was also, as these things go, rather quickly shortened to "The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future." The spirit survived; the expletive did not.
"The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future" is the title that shaped the book — a slightly irreverent yet subtly profound exploration of emerging technologies, told through science fiction movies. But after reading the first draft, Andrew's editor at Mango Publishing decided they needed something that better captured the moral and ethical dimension of the work. The result was Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies.
The original title didn't disappear entirely, though. When Andrew developed the book into an undergraduate course at Arizona State University, he saw his chance. The course is called The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future — the title he'd wanted all along. He would have used the full, uncensored version, but was told it was too long for the course catalog. There may have been another reason.
The idea for the book began to germinate around 2016–2017. Andrew was teaching in ASU's School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and students iin the program were watching science fiction films that connected to the technologies they were studying. The films kept opening up conversations that went far beyond what a conventional lecture could achieve.
The moment things began to crystallize came in an IMAX theater. Andrew was watching Inferno — alone, as it happened — and found himself thinking about how the film, despite its relative shallowness as a Hollywood chase movie, could be used to open up serious conversations about gain-of-function research, engineered pathogens, and the ethics of doing terrible things for arguably good reasons. It wasn't a single eureka moment so much as the tipping point of a growing conviction: that science fiction movies, watched through the right lens, were an extraordinarily powerful tool for thinking about technology, society, and the future.
The result was a book built around twelve films, selected from a shortlist of around a hundred. Fifty made the intermediate cut. Twelve made the final book — not because they were the best sci-fi films ever made, but because together they created an overarching narrative arc across biotechnologies, cybertechnologies, and materials science. Some obvious choices were deliberately left out because they were too expected. Some critically panned films filled gaps nothing else could. And at least two of them — Transcendence (20% on Rotten Tomatoes) and Inferno (19%) — were included despite scores that would make most authors nervous.
Andrew's response when people push back on the "bad" films: the point was never the film itself, but the conversations and ideas it sparks. Even a flawed film can be extraordinary in the right context. And the inverted commas around "bad" are deliberate — he was once told by a producer that so much goes into making a movie that there are no bad films, just different opinions on them.
Andrew reckons he has watched each of the twelve core films at least fifteen to twenty times. He loves every one of them — even the ones he cheerfully admits are clunky.
He is often asked which is his favorite, and the honest answer is that each one occupies a different place. Jurassic Park because it is so well made and stands the test of time. Never Let Me Go because it is devastating in how it shines a light on society — Andrew tears up every time he starts showing it in class; that first scene is enough. Transcendence because, even though it's slow and clunky, it has an important story to tell. The Day After Tomorrow because it's a crackingly well-constructed and paced movie with a strong emotional core. And Contact because it's special and deeply resonates with him as a scientist — another film where he can't help tearing up in class as the final dedication "For Carl" appears on screen.
But if really pushed, his favorite is Ex Machina. The scripting, the direction, the design — every decision adds to the narrative with a clarity that's rare. Andrew's one regret is that he will probably never have the chance to sit down with director Alex Garland and talk about the film: his thinking and intentions behind it, whether the book's reading is on base or off, how Garland thinks the film holds up given everything that has happened with AI since, and the craft of making something that tight.
Andrew and his wife did make a pilgrimage to the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway where Ex Machina was filmed. They talked with the owner about the shoot and stayed in the same room that Caleb was filmed entering and Ava was filmed leaving. Surreal.
The publishing story has its own tensions. Andrew's publisher, Mango Publishing, was not happy with the length of the manuscript — it pushed the book into a higher printing cost category. This may have been behind the editor's push to cut the Contact chapter. Andrew fought to keep it. Contact became the chapter that closes the entire book's argument — the film that brings together science, belief, and what it means to navigate a technological future with both rigor and humility. It is one of the chapters Andrew is most glad he wrote.
The compromise on length was typographic: the published book uses a notably small font. (If you have a choice, the ebook may be easier on the eyes.)
Andrew initially wasn't sure about the cover design but has grown to appreciate it — it's distinctive, and in a field crowded with generic tech imagery, that counts for something.
During writing, Andrew had the soundtracks of the twelve films on continuous loop. It was part of immersing himself in the worlds the films create — a way of staying inside the emotional and narrative texture of each story while working through the ideas they opened up.
After the manuscript was submitted, he put together a short compilation of themes from eleven of the films. One movie didn't make the musical cut — The Man in the White Suit, whose soundtrack didn't fit the flow. And a couple of films appear out of their book order to ensure a strong musical narrative. Nobody else will notice, but Andrew is quietly proud of the transitions between each piece that he managed during editing. The audiophile and music lover in him — the one who listens to a lot of classical music on vinyl through Harbeth speakers — wouldn't have it any other way.
You can listen to the compilation on The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future course page.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Andrew sat down in his home studio with a decent podcast mic and the book open in front of him, and recorded himself reading the entire text. The recordings were initially posted on YouTube as a resource for people looking for content and connection during an isolating time. They were later published as a podcast series on the Future of Being Human Substack.
He made the deliberate choice to read directly from the book — no script, no adaptation, just the text as written. In some ways this was a difficult decision. The audio is a little echoey in places, and you can hear page turns and the occasional mouth sound (though the tracks have been cleaned up since). Maintaining consistency across a book this long was genuinely hard.
But listening back, what comes through is the authenticity — the voice in Andrew's head as he was writing, now audible. The cadence, the pauses, the moments where the writing shifts register from analytical to personal — these are things a summary can describe but cannot reproduce. If you want to experience the book as close to the author's own internal reading as possible, the podcast is the way to do it. Typos, bloopers, and all.
In August 2021, Elon Musk announced the Tesla Bot — a humanoid robot designed to eliminate dangerous, repetitive, and boring tasks. Andrew was teaching The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future at the time, and the class was deep in discussions about the fine line between what entrepreneurs can do and what they should do.
The students had an idea. Fifty-four of them signed a cover letter, and Andrew packaged up twenty-seven copies of Films from the Future and shipped the box to the Tesla Bot team. The letter was supportive but pointed: "We've seen how this story plays out in too many sci-fi movies, and it's not good!" They hoped the book might help the team think about making a robot that was a little less I, Robot and a little more Bicentennial Man.
The box should have held twenty-eight copies. But Andrew, being Andrew, swapped one out for something else: his personal, signed copy of Iain M. Banks' Look to Windward. Banks is one of Andrew's favorite writers — flawed, expansive, compelling, a brilliant and poetic storyteller, and a clear influence on how Andrew thinks about technology, society, and the future. Banks' Culture novels explore alternative relationships between technology and civilization with an ambition and imagination that few other writers have matched, and the neural lace concept from those novels directly influenced Musk's Neuralink. Andrew knew Musk was a Banks fan and took a gamble that a signed copy, hidden among the others with a note marked for his attention, might get a response for the students.
It didn't. No acknowledgment was ever received — not for the twenty-seven copies of Films from the Future, not for the students' letter, and not for the signed Banks. The box is presumably still sitting in a storeroom somewhere. As Andrew wrote on his Substack: "The thing is, if it is, I'd like my book back please."
In November 2018 — the same month Films from the Future was published — the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR gene editing to modify the embryos of twin girls, creating the world's first gene-edited babies. It was one of the most significant and controversial moments in the history of biotechnology.
The book's frameworks — "could we, should we," the role of scientists, the "immoral logic" of doing questionable things for ostensibly good reasons — turned out to be directly applicable to the case. The territory the book had mapped was suddenly, urgently real.
Andrew didn't experience this as a vindication moment. The book had touched on this ground well, and He Jiankui's announcement didn't feel like being upstaged or having missed something. But looking back, he also acknowledges that he didn't leverage the moment as effectively as he might have — a case where the book's ideas were precisely what the public conversation needed, and the connection wasn't made loudly enough.
There is a version of the book's story that is pure triumph: physicist-turned-professor writes unconventional book using sci-fi movies to explore the ethics of emerging technologies, book finds its audience, ideas enter the conversation.
That version is true. But it's incomplete.
Andrew deliberately chose an independent publisher. Mango Publishing (which has since closed its doors) offered speed, a business model that leaned into authors with an online presence, and direct access to his editor. He did not want the slow process of finding an agent, developing that relationship, and pitching the book through traditional channels. This was not his day job. He was — and is — a professor, an academic, and a scientist first. He wanted the ideas out as quickly as possible, and he wanted as much control over the content as he could get.
He is pleased with that decision. But it came at a cost.
Authors are always told that most books don't sell — especially those not published by one of the big five houses. Andrew knew this intellectually. Knowing it emotionally was different. The book didn't get as much traction as he had hoped. It was overlooked by some colleagues. He spent the first year after publication waking up each morning asking what he could do differently to increase readership and visibility, and each day being disappointed.
These are challenges that many authors grapple with and that are rarely discussed openly — especially in academia, where talking about the gap between what you hoped for and what happened is considered bad form. But the experience is real, it is common, and it is worth acknowledging.
In the grand scheme of things, the book has done well. It is used in university courses, high school classrooms, book clubs, and professional workshops. It has reached readers who needed exactly this kind of thinking tool — people trying to navigate the relationship between technology and society without being told what to think. And the ideas in it have only become more relevant since publication.
But the book also falls between cracks. It is not a movie book or a tech book. It is not a polemic, it does not take an ideological stance, it does not set out to confirm biases or deliver the kind of hot take that generates attention. It crosses boundaries to help people find their own pathway forward — and that, while important, is not always what sells.
The website you are reading now — spoileralert.wtf — is, in some ways, a new chapter in the book's life: an attempt to make its ideas more discoverable, more explorable, and more useful to the conversations that need them.
The Moviegoer's Guide to the Future is an undergraduate course at Arizona State University, open to all in-person undergrads, where students watch all twelve films in class — from beginning to end, like going to the movies — and use them to explore emerging technologies, responsible innovation, and the future of being human.
The course uses an "active viewing" approach: students come prepared, take notes, make connections between films, and pay attention to everything from the music to the body language of actors. It is not passive movie-watching. It is, as Andrew describes it, even better than just watching movies for fun — because concentration reveals layers that casual viewing misses.
Students consistently say they sign up because it looks easy and interesting, and leave saying it's one of the best courses they've taken. Andrew's favorite piece of student feedback: one student called it their "stoner class" but admitted they learned more from it than they expected, while really enjoying it.
You can watch the course trailer on YouTube and download the current syllabus from the course page.
Three writers loom large in the book's DNA, and they are worth knowing about:
Douglas Adams gave the book its closing argument. "Don't Panic" — from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — frames the entire final chapter, and Adams' ability to use humor to open doors into genuinely complex territory runs through the book's approach to every topic. The original working title was a direct nod to Adams' fictional guidebook.
Terry Pratchett shaped the book's social observation — the way it notices the gap between how people and institutions behave and how they claim to behave. Pratchett's gentle satire could expose a system's absurdity without making the people inside it feel stupid. When the book writes about societies quietly accommodating morally questionable technologies, the register is Pratchettian.
Iain M. Banks is a quieter but no less important presence. Banks' Culture novels explore alternative relationships between technology, civilization, and the future with an ambition that few writers have matched. His influence on Andrew's thinking percolates through the book more subtly than Pratchett or Adams, but it is there — in the expansiveness of the questions asked, and in the conviction that imagining radically different futures is not escapism but essential work. Banks' neural lace concept appears directly in the Ghost in the Shell chapter.
All three writers share something: the ability to treat serious subjects with irreverence and irreverent subjects with seriousness. That combination is the book's signature.