A Biweekly Salon Series · Bay Area · 2026

THE SFSF
SALON

Science & Fiction · San Francisco

AI is rewriting the world in real time. The genre built to warn us about the future has fallen behind the present. This salon asks: what comes next?

Sci-fi was our early warning system.
It's now running behind.

For a century, science fiction prepared us for the future — nuclear weapons, surveillance states, genetic engineering, space travel. But AI has broken the pattern.

Most published sci-fi about AI is already outdated by the time it reaches shelves. The genre that once ran decades ahead is now months behind. The people building the future are our neighbors — and almost no one in the literary world is asking them what they see.

The SFSF Salon exists to close that gap. Writers, engineers, poets, filmmakers, and builders — in conversation, in San Francisco, at the moment everything changed.

39mo
From "research preview" to Pentagon standoff
100M
ChatGPT users in 2 months — fastest ever
4.5mo
How often AI task capability doubles now
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself.
— Ray Bradbury

Every other week.
In person. Bay Area.

Small by design. 10–20 people max. A mix of discussion, readings, and making — with a bias toward people who are living inside the transformation, not just observing it.

01
The Thesis
Each session opens with a short provocation. A question, a reading, a piece of news from the week. Something to anchor the conversation.
02
The Discussion
Open floor. Facilitated but not scripted. Everyone in the room has something different to bring — writers, engineers, filmmakers, researchers, builders.
03
The Making
A closing prompt: write one sentence, one image, one idea. Over six sessions, we build something together. What that is — the group decides.

Six sessions.
One question.

Can the people with front-row seats to the AI transformation write the science fiction this moment demands?

Born in San Francisco.
At the right moment.

The SFSF Salon is a project of Machine Cinema — a global community of 20,000+ creatives using AI to make films, tell stories, and reinvent media.

Before San Francisco was the capital of AI, it was the capital of imagining what technology would do to us. Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Frank Herbert all wrote from here. Lucasfilm and Pixar built visual storytelling here.

Every tech wave in SF has produced a counter-wave of culture. The salon is ours.

Who's in the room

  • Writers working at the edge of genre
  • Engineers building the systems sci-fi warned us about
  • Filmmakers using AI as a creative medium
  • Researchers who live inside the theory
  • Poets who can say in 14 lines what takes a novel 400 pages
  • Builders who read Lem and Chiang for inspiration
  • Anyone with a genuine investment in what stories we tell about what's happening to us
Read the Opening Presentation →
Join the Salon

The next great science fiction
starts here.

Sessions are invite-only and intimate. If you're a writer, technologist, filmmaker, or researcher in the Bay Area — and this conversation sounds like the one you've been wanting to have — get in touch.

Get in Touch