"The Hard Problem" is a new episode of the Into The Impossible podcast from the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination: it features the outcome of a collaboration between legendary performance artist Marina Abramović (previously) and environmentalist science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson (previously): a short story about an interstellar journey incorporating elements of Robinson's outstanding 2015 novel Aurora -- a novel that is pitiless in its insistence on rigor in our thinking about the problems of living in space and on other planets.


The audio elements in the podcast (MP3) were produced during a day-long workshop with Abramović and Robinson at the Clarke Center, which subsequently appeared at the Venice Bienalle. The audioscape is rich and haunting, and has moments of goosepimple-raising eeriness as the narration invites us to put ourselves in the mind of an AI plying the spaces between the stars.