It’s not quite as aggressively science fictional as her phenomenal video about a droid auction-slash-rock-concert for “Many Moons,” which she released more than four years ago, but the video for Janelle Monae’s excellent collaboration with Erykah Badu “Q.U.E.E.N.” is a reminder of just how important her contributions to science fiction—as well as to music—have been since she broke out onto the national scene:

Monae is hardly the first musician to situate her musical persona in science fiction. Psychadelia gave us Jefferson Starship. George Clinton has a long and deep engagement with spaceship iconography and science fiction more broadly. On “Roses,” a caustic anti-love song with no other particularly science fictional elements from his The Love Below album, Andre 3000 entreated the woman being addressed in the track to “come back down to Mars.” When you read music as narrative fiction, locations beyond Earth and times far removed from ours are common settings. But in a few short years, and across multiple songs and videos, Monae has created a particularly coherent universe full of robots sold as luxury goods to decadent, exceedingly well-dressed droids and rebels, institutions that house revolutionary figures, some of whom can walk through walls, and electrifying musical performances.

And the coherence of her music video universe isn’t the only thing striking about Monae’s ouvre, or that marks her as a science fictional thinker. As I wrote on Wednesday, Hollywood tends to portray technology and our loss of control of it—or misuse of it—as a major factor in the creation of radically altered future. Monae’s music videos frequently operate from the premise that cultural tools are at least as powerful as technical or physical ones.

In the video for “Many Moons,” Cindi Mayweather, an android who Monae presents as an alter ego, gives an electrifying performance at an auction of extraordinarily expensive androids. Her music, which makes reference to a wide range of social and political issues, is initially treated as dance music for frenzied, regimented revelers. But when her performance literally shorts her out, what was intended as a classy backdrop to an ugly transaction disrupts it. The musician becomes an activist through her passionate dedication to her performance. In the introduction to “Q.U.E.E.N.” a voiceover explains that visitors are at a museum where revolutionaries who disrupted society with music have been archived for public consumption. They’re resurrected by a record snuck into the facility, which frees Monae’s character to ask questions that begin in the personal, like “Am I a freak for dancing around? / Am I a freak for getting down?” and move to the political: “I asked a question like this / ‘Are we a lost generation of our people?’ / Add us to equations but they’ll never make us equal. / She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel. / So why ain’t the stealing of my rights made illegal? / They keep us underground working hard for the greedy, / But when it’s time pay they turn around and call us needy.”

Monae isn’t the only person with the idea that cultural power can create dramatic inflection points in the evolution of the future. Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From The Goon Squad culminates in a concert by an artist who begins the book as an extraordinarily broken man and reemerges as a children’s musician. The concert starts as a marketing gig for one of the characters in the novel, but it turns into an astonishing experience that united two generations, one similar to the Millenials, and the one that followed, who have embraced digital communication but rejected drug use and tattoos. It’s an amazing conclusion to the novel in part because it’s strikingly different from much of what we see in science fiction in a number of ways: it’s set in the near-future instead of far off, it’s hopeful instead of apocalyptic, and it’s collective and artistic instead of individual and technological.

To a certain extent, the place where Egan ends is the one from which Monae blasts off. Given Monae’s extraordinarily precise sense of visual style, the concepts she’s pulled together and expressed with directors with a range of visual styles, and the way her lyrics would fit in larger narrative settings, I’d love to see what planet she’d land on if she had the opportunity to tell stories over 120 minutes instead of six of them.

I’m quite looking forward to Robot & Frank, a story about an aging jewel thief and the robot he’s given to keep him company, not just because of the absurdly terrific cast, or the fact that it’s near-future science fiction, which tends to employ small changes rather than broad metaphors, to sharp effect:

Robot & Frank is a case where the scenario in which the technology’s being employed—to resume Frank’s heist career, and get revenge on the tech nerds who are taking over the local library—is actually more baroque than the technology itself. Japanese companies have long been at work developing robots to assist in many aspects of elder care. Technology companies depend on our ability to develop low-level emotional bonds with technology ranging from Roombas, which act as surrogate pets, to Apple’s Siri voice technology. And the continued work and social lives of aging people, as well as elder care, are major issues that Hollywood almost never has the courage to touch, much less approach from the perspective of people who are aging rather than the younger people who will take lessons from them. I’m almost as excited for a thoughtful, funny, fully human story about retirees as I am to see a movie about robots.

As I write this, I’m waiting for the end of the work day so I can go home and pick up my iPhone 4s (having made a full plunge and purchased an iPhone and a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in the same week). So I’ll have more data to report on this once I’ve done some actual experimenting of my own. But one thing that strikes me about the early reporting on what you can say to Siri and what she says back suggests that there’s something feminist at work in Apple’s chipper new assistant.

I know it sounds odd. My first reaction on hearing that Apple was embedding personal assistant software with the voice and name of a lady in its new phone was vexation. Did we seriously need to be a nation of Don Drapers, men and women alike handing over mundane tasks and dictating notes to a female assistant? If we were going to become a nation of fauxecutives, couldn’t we at least choose the gender of our assistant? Because if we all get one, I want to rescue Entourage‘s Lloyd from Ari. But it actually sounds like Siri’s set up to push back against the kind of sexual harassment a real woman like her might get from the Don Drapers of the world. As Slate notes:

The choice to make Siri a woman leads to predictable sorts of harassment, though I like how she brushes it off with both sarcasm and a turning of the mirror upon the master. If you call her a “bitch,” she will sometimes reply: “Why do you hate me? I don’t even exist.” For me, Siri’s voice isn’t especially bitchy or sexy. She evokes a second-grade teacher, one who is fast with a response but also willing to patiently explain. There’s also a pronounced robotic cast to the voice that I find reassuring, a reminder that the intelligence we’re dealing with is artificial.

And as a Tumblr dedicated to her utterances observes, queries like “Talk dirty to me” are met with responses ranging from “Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel,” to “The carpet needs vacuuming.” Siri’s supposed to adapt, so I’d be curious to see if you persistently abuse her, she learns to take it, or if she keeps pushing back. It’s a first little experiment in what seem likely to be more extensive relationships with artificial intelligence (something that the unfortunately-named upcoming HBO show China Doll will explore). And it’s nice to see that, if we’re going to have sort of stereotypical lady robots, they’re going to be able to show some guff.

I’ve written before that the British are much better than we are at making movies about class because the British entertainment industry appears to accept as a first principle that working-class people exist and that they exist as fully realized human beings, so they can be specific and interesting about things like the culture of council housing, as in projects like Attack the Block. So it’s interesting to see this dreamy short movie that subs out the Afro-Caribbean poor in the 1981 Brixton riots for robots:

We’re pretty good at depicting actual oppressed people in other struggles here in the U.S., be it against racism or for gay rights. And for some reason, we’re okay with movie depictions of working-class people if they’re fighting fairly targeted campaigns against companies, whether it’s for protection against sexual harassment in North Country or for unionization — as long as it’s in the past, or even better, in the past and in a foreign country like in Made in Dagenham — or if they’re adorable children or surly teenagers who will presumably rise out of poverty via the transformative power of education as embodied in a single noble teacher. And it’s true we’ve got a couple of shows about characters who are not just working-class but struggling, Raising Hope and Shameless (which is, of course, a remake of a British original).

But I wonder if we might have more day-to-day depictions of genuinely working-class and poor characters if those characters weren’t always human. Obviously, the aliens in District 9 are a metaphor for the impacts of apartheid more than anything else, but one of the means of enforcing apartheid was economic: the so-called “homelands” weren’t exactly rich in mining or agriculturally productive land, and people who lived in the homelands were treated as migrant workers when they took jobs outside of those territories. The prawns are scary because they’re aliens, but South Africa’s able to stigmatize them by economically isolating them, charging them insanely inflationary prices for the cat food that they prefer, spreading rumors about their sexual practices, confining them to substandard housing and then evicting them from it.

Similarly, the robots of Brixton obviously aren’t human, but in a way, by removing factors like race from the equation, I wonder if it might be easier for audiences to feel bad about the idea of doing things to robots that we’re perfectly comfortable with businesses and governments doing to actual humans. Of course, the problem then is transferring that sympathy to actual people, and that outrage to actual policies. But if we can find alternative ways into conversations that won’t make people shut down, it’s a start.