Public Transit Visions in Speculative Fiction
Flying cars in the Jetsons; trains snaking around towers in Wakanda, or the sentient rail system on the newly terraformed Sask-E planet. In building future and alternative worlds, the way people get around can be used to reveal and ask questions about societies, technologies, and politics.
Join this panel discussion to learn how depictions of public transit in fiction shape the worlds of our imagination.
Panelists:
Jeffery Tumlin
Annalee Newitz
Alissa Walker
Vincent Woo
Audrey T. Williams
Alexis Madrigal
Panelist Bios (more to be added soon):
Alissa Walker is a writer based in Los Angeles where she has covered transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy for two decades. She edits the newsletter Torched which tracks the legacy improvements that LA is making for upcoming mega-events. Alissa is the 2021 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary for her writing on design and urbanism, and played herself on the traffic safety episode of Adam Conover’s show Adam Ruins Everything.
Alexis Madrigal is a journalist based in Oakland, California. He's the co-host of KQED’s current affairs show, Forum, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and author of the book Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Fusion and a staff writer at Wired.
Audrey T. Williams is a Poet and Writer with Black American and Indo-Burmese heritage. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. Audrey is an active literary citizen in the Bay Area, having curated readings for San Francisco LitQuake, Beast Crawl and more. She is the Co-Chair for World Fantasy Convention 2026 to be held in Oakland, and was the inaugural Speculative Poet Laureate for BayCon 2025. Audrey writes across all genres and her writing is published or forthcoming in Space & Time Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Intima Journal of Narrative Medicine, Conjuring Worlds: an Afrofuturist Textbook, and the HorrorAddicts podcast, among others. Audrey teaches “Poetry as Medicine” and can be found on IG at @audthentic_stories. Her first chapbook, Attending Sorrow: poems & writing prompts for living with grief, is forthcoming in Fall 2025.