Future Tense Fiction Video

Food, Labor, and the Future of “Luxury”: An Interview With Erin K. Wagner

Share

Erin K. Wagner’s short story “The Middle” brings us to a luxury restaurant in a future Atlantic City. When the restaurant’s owner brings in a robot sous-chef, the human staff protest—all but the head chef, who is left alone to navigate how to cook and serve in a human-robot team. The story explores the future of luxury dining, the role of humans in an automated workplace, and what we really crave from a culinary experience.

In an interview with editor Mia Armstrong-López, Wagner shares the story behind her August 2025 Future Tense Fiction story.

Read the response essay by food studies scholar Christy Spackman here.

Future Tense Fiction is a partnership between Issues in Science and Technology and the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.

Newsletter Signup

More Future Tense Fiction

  • Rey Velasquez Sagcal's illustration
    Can We Cool Down Data?

    The energy demands of data centers—accelerated by artificial intelligence—are steering us toward disaster. Could biology help bring us back from the brink?

  • Rey Velasquez Sagcal's illustration for "Subsidence" by E. G. Condé
    Subsidence

    The AI boom means more demands on data centers—and running a data center requires complex technical infrastructure, vast environmental resources, and experienced human talent. In E. G. Condé’s story, a labyrinthine data center is in the middle of a massive outage. When the corporation that owns the center fails to diagnose the problem provoking the outage with its fancy technical systems, it’s forced to turn to human intuition to sniff out a more fundamental dilemma.

  • Rey Velasquez Sagcal's illustration
    Can Your Health Be Boiled Down to a Single Number?

    If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60% chance of success, but another treatment with a 50% success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90%? Would you change your answer?

  • Rey Velasquez Sagcal's illustration for "Yellow" by B. Pladek
    Yellow

    If there were an app that estimated the risk of every decision, would you use it? B. Pladek’s short story “Yellow” explores how data changes the way we think about risk—and what happens when that data is manipulated.