Steelman Press
Palmer Luckey

Stealing from Science Fiction

What if every billion-dollar defense idea was stolen from a novel?

Preface

Palmer Luckey read thousands of books before he turned thirteen. Not hundreds. Thousands. He was homeschooled in Southern California, self-directed in the subjects that interested him, and what interested him was everything — "the classics, science fiction, The Art of the Deal". People who knew him bought him books in bulk. His mother used a Barnes & Noble educator discount to feed the habit. By the time most kids were picking electives, Luckey had consumed a private library's worth of fiction, and it had already begun to rewire how he thought about the world.

By fifteen, he was building VR headsets in a camper trailer. Dozens of awful prototypes over four years. By nineteen, he'd created his first versions that made friends say "I get it now". That became Oculus. He sold it to Facebook for billions. Facebook fired him — in what he describes as a politically motivated termination over a $9,000 donation. He started Anduril Industries, a defense technology company now worth tens of billions, and began building autonomous fighter jets, AI-powered surveillance systems, and underwater drones.

And throughout all of it — the VR headsets, the firing, the weapons — the books never stopped.

The Theft

Luckey has a line he delivers with the cheerful shamelessness of someone who has thought about it very carefully and decided he doesn't mind how it sounds. On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, when asked about his creative process:

I steal all of my ideas from science fiction from the '60s and '70s. That's, that's mostly what I do.

Palmer LuckeyMoonshots with Peter Diamandis

He wasn't joking. On the Shawn Ryan Show:

I've literally never come up with an idea that a science fiction author has not come up with before at some point, which makes sense. There's a lot of them. They've been around for a long time. And they don't have to make things and they don't have to wait till the right moment.

Palmer LuckeyShawn Ryan Show

It is a methodological claim about where technological innovation comes from, and Luckey has built his career on it. His argument rests on a kind of crowd-sourcing logic: the combined imaginative output of the top thousand sci-fi authors over the past century represents far more thinking time about future technologies than any single inventor could muster. They explored not just the technologies but their social and geopolitical consequences, their cascading second- and third-order effects — territory that pure engineering rarely touches.

On Off Topic, a Japanese podcast, the humbling version of the point:

Even things where I thought it was new and I thought nobody had ever come up with it, it turns out that when you dig into it, there's at least one, usually dozens of science fiction authors who've had literally the exact same idea.

Palmer LuckeyOff Topic / オフトピック

So the inventor's job, in Luckey's telling, is not to imagine. It is to recognize — to identify which imagined futures have become technically feasible, and to execute on them at exactly the right moment. He started Oculus when VR's moment had finally arrived. A science fiction author doesn't need to wait for that moment. They can think about it and write about it decades before the technology catches up.

The extraction is specific, and it goes deeper than broad inspiration. On the Shawn Ryan Show, he described analyzing Skynet from the Terminator franchise: its fundamental mistake was being given control of nuclear weapons, an application where AI offers no meaningful advantage — all risk, no upside. The better use would have been limiting AI to systems where autonomy actually helps — like fighter jets flying into areas too dangerous for human pilots. Anduril recently won a contract to build exactly that, beating Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.

On Moonshots, he broke down how J.A.R.V.I.S. distributes across all of Iron Man's systems — suit, weapons, individual munitions — making Tony Stark not a solo operator but a human amplified by AI. That distributed AI model is, essentially, Anduril's Lattice platform. Fiction didn't merely foreshadow the product. It provided the interaction design.

The Patron Saint

If Luckey has a single foundational author, it is Robert Heinlein. He has said on multiple occasions, across different shows and years, that he has read every novel Heinlein published. On a16z crypto, when Chris Dixon mentioned reading Stranger in a Strange Land:

I've read every single Heinlein.

Palmer Luckeya16z crypto

Heinlein's work directly feeds Anduril's products. Luckey described discovering that Heinlein had published a short story in a 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction about AI-piloted fighter jets flying alongside human pilots — a concept his company is now building for the US Air Force. The influence is not metaphorical:

There are ideas that he lays out for how he believes you should communicate with and personify AI in... for piloting ships that we have copied into our products.

Palmer LuckeyMoonshots with Peter Diamandis

Copied. Not "drawn inspiration from." Copied. He also cited Heinlein's 1959 Starship Troopers novel as a direct antecedent for the augmented soldier vision systems Anduril builds today — ideas from sixty-five years ago that only recently became technologically feasible.

Luckey is also passionate about defending Heinlein against reductive criticism. When people call Heinlein a fascist because of Starship Troopers:

It's so funny when people call him a fascist because of Starship Troopers. And they've clearly never read other Heinlein. Like, Heinlein also wrote basically like pro-worker, pro-communist work. There's works where literal communists who seize the means of production from the private companies are the heroes of it.

Palmer Luckeya16z crypto

He prizes versatility — an author who can inhabit multiple political positions across different works, exploring each on its own terms without collapsing into a single ideology. That Heinlein wrote military sci-fi and countercultural fiction and socialist utopias is precisely the point. Reducing him to one is a failure of reading.

He's just a great sci-fi author... He does it all. He makes fun of every p- anyway, yeah, but love Heinlein, incredible.

Palmer Luckeya16z crypto

The Concept-Driven Genre

When asked directly for his favorite science fiction novel on Joe Lonsdale: American Optimist, Luckey named The Unincorporated Man by Dani and Eytan Kollin — a story about a 1990s industrialist who enters cryo sleep and wakes up in a future where every person is incorporated at birth, with the government and other entities owning shares of each individual. The protagonist becomes the only person with complete autonomy, giving him a freedom that even the wealthiest people in that world lack.

I love that novel. It gets into being like a crazy space opera further into the trilogy. But The Unincorporated Man is a great book.

Palmer LuckeyJoe Lonsdale: American Optimist

The choice reveals what he values in fiction: a single technological or social premise, explored for its consequences rather than its spectacle. This is the genre he mourns the decline of. On Moonshots, he rattled off the old exemplars — Knight Rider, Airwolf, The Six Million Dollar Man, Robocop — and described a creative template he wishes still existed:

There was a period in the 70s and 80s, like, the take a piece of technology and that is the show genre... That genre has gone away, which is unfortunate. I want it to come back.

Palmer LuckeyMoonshots with Peter Diamandis

Modern sci-fi, he argues, is largely not as concept-driven, making older works more valuable for extracting actionable technological ideas. What he wants from fiction is operational depth. Take a technology. Isolate it. Explore its first-order, second-order, and tertiary effects. That's the fiction he can use.

The Other Canon

But there is another Palmer Luckey. The one who blocks out every Saturday as "Ani-day" with his wife. Who grew up on Dragon Ball and Pokemon via Toonami, calls Code Geass his all-time favorite, and owns a Gun Gale Online-wrapped electric car with 670 horsepower in an 1,800-pound frame. Who defers to Hideaki Anno's creative authority over the Evangelion franchise with a reverence he extends to almost nobody.

This matters because Anduril — the defense company — uses anime-style marketing videos for its products. Not as a gimmick. As a policy consequence. Luckey made a rule early on that Anduril would never release a render or concept video — only real footage of real products doing real missions. When they needed to illustrate capabilities that couldn't be filmed (like synchronized autonomous underwater systems where the water visibility wasn't good enough), the only acceptable alternative was something so stylized it couldn't be mistaken for reality:

I refuse to do renders or fakes. I said, 'I'm down to do highly stylized'... And that was actually how we ended up doing so many anime videos.

Palmer LuckeyOff Topic / オフトピック

The two streams of fiction — Western golden-age hard sci-fi and Japanese anime — serve completely different functions in his life. Heinlein gives him extractable concepts. Code Geass gives him aesthetic fuel, emotional resonance, and the language in which a $14 billion defense company talks to the world. The engineering canon and the pleasure canon are housed in the same person and rarely overlap.

Except at one point. When listing the fictional traditions that demand he build a real bipedal mech, Luckey cited Neon Genesis Evangelion and Gundam alongside Pacific Rim and Power Rangers. The anime and the Western sci-fi converge where fiction stops being input and becomes obligation — where something just needs to exist.

Inspiration, Not Warning

Luckey's most distinctive position on fiction is his insistence that it should be read primarily as inspiration rather than caution. He has talked to the VR authors themselves about this:

I talk to people who've written all the classic sci-fi novels about VR and I say, 'Hey, do you really think VR is gonna lead to a horrible, dystopian, broken future?' And almost universally, their answer is, 'Of course not. But I have to write a story, and stories need conflict.'

Palmer LuckeyMoonshots with Peter Diamandis

Nobody's going to read a book where Palmer Luckey invents the Oculus Rift and it brings lasting peace and economic prosperity to the world and everything is great and everyone loves it. The dystopian tone is a structural requirement of storytelling, not a genuine prediction.

What troubles him is the downstream effect. A society that starts to demonize new things becomes Luddite in ways that choke actual innovation. He sees the pattern repeating: genetic engineering dismissed because of Jurassic Park, AI treated as a failed technology when Anduril launched in 2017 and couldn't even mention AI during fundraising, VR dismissed as permanent vaporware. Cultural antibodies get activated by fiction, and real technologies get strangled in the crib. Don't argue, he says. Execute. He invoked the Wright Brothers:

Imagine if the Wright brothers had, instead of building their flying machine, had gone to argue with this guy. Right? You just, at some point you have to say, 'You know what, they're just wrong about our future and we just need to build that future.'

Palmer LuckeyOff Topic / オフトピック

Three weeks before the Wrights' first powered flight, the New York Times editorial board declared that flying machines were folly and would never work even if every scientist on Earth labored for millions of years.

But Luckey's most surprising move in this space isn't triumphalism. At the International Spy Museum, he reached back twenty-four centuries and read from Plato's Phaedrus — Socrates arguing against the invention of writing itself:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of all who learn to use it... You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding, and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

Palmer LuckeyInternational Spy Museum

And then:

I think most people would agree on the balance, that the last few thousand years since Socrates are probably better for having the written word. We keep going through the cycle over and over again. Someday, me and you, we're both gonna be Socrates.

Palmer LuckeyInternational Spy Museum

He doesn't know which technology he's currently wrong about. But he knows the pattern well enough to place himself inside it — as someone who will, eventually, look foolish for resisting something his generation can't yet see clearly.

The Writer Who Builds, the Builder Who Writes

What most listeners miss, buried in longer conversations, is that Luckey writes his own speculative fiction. On Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, he described a story about an alien species whose perception lags hours behind reality, but they're so intelligent they predict responses multiple steps ahead, making the delay undetectable — until humans learn to act unpredictably outside social norms. On the Shawn Ryan Show, he described another about a tier one operator who uses robotics to continue operating into his seventies and eighties, his body broken but his instincts and knowledge intact. Both follow the concept-driven approach he admires in Heinlein: take a single premise, chase consequences.

From time to time, I write these short stories just to entertain myself. I've never published any of them.

Palmer LuckeyMoonshots with Peter Diamandis

The fiction writing has no product at the end. It's the same cognitive process he uses to build companies — isolate a variable, run the simulation, map the consequences — aimed at nothing except his own satisfaction. And his speculative instinct doesn't stop at short stories. On The Joe Rogan Experience, he gave a detailed summary of Michael Crichton's Sphere — a novel about a seemingly alien spacecraft that turns out to be a time-traveling US Navy vessel — and used it to frame his own theories about UAPs. He concluded that time travelers, dimensional bleed-through, and unknown earthly origins are all more plausible than conventional interstellar visitors. When processing the unexplained, he reaches for novels before he reaches for physics.

On the same show, he went deeper on the Terminator franchise — not the plot, but the design choices. Why did Skynet make its combat robots humanoid? The later models had flesh coverings for infiltration, sure. But the earlier T-Series? Bare metal skeletons walking around with no disguise. His personal "head canon":

It's almost like an admission that the AI does see itself in the mind of a, it sees itself as a creation of man, it sees itself in the eyes of man.

Palmer LuckeyThe Joe Rogan Experience

He compared it to the biblical concept of God creating man in his image — an AI deriving some satisfaction or value from its origin. This from a man who builds AI combat systems for a living, thinking carefully about what it would mean for those systems to develop self-concept.

The Futures He Mourns

Here is where Luckey's relationship with science fiction becomes something more than strategy. He loves manned space fighters. Exoskeletons. Orbital drop troops. The full vocabulary of military science fiction, the genre that shaped his imagination before his engineering mind learned to overrule it. And he knows, as someone who builds this stuff for a living, that almost none of it is coming.

I want pilots with perfluorocarbon in their lungs sitting in their liquid G beds pulling 400 G turns in space. That's what I want. But it's not what it's going to be."

"I want the space marines dropping out of orbit into the drop zone as much as any science fiction fan. But unfortunately, I suspect that that time has passed.

Palmer LuckeyMoonshots with Peter Diamandis

The reason is straightforward and, for him, bittersweet: humans have become the limitation rather than the enabler in military technology. AI, sensors, and communications have surpassed the point where wrapping a system around a fragile human body makes tactical sense. So Luckey builds autonomous drones instead of powered armor. He deploys AI fighter jets instead of manned space fighters. Reality won, and the sci-fi fan in him registers it as a loss.

But then there is the mech. On IMPAULSIVE, in a conversation that had been bouncing between drone capabilities and video game comparisons, Luckey made a promise that had nothing to do with tactics:

I am going to build a bipedal mech, a big one, before I die. Not because I believe it's gonna be particularly tactically relevant, but because I think that it's a thing that just needs to exist. It's such a staple of sci-fi.

Palmer LuckeyIMPAULSIVE

He cited Neon Genesis Evangelion, Gundam, Pacific Rim, Power Rangers. He brought out the original Power Rangers Morpher belts he keeps in his office. The mech doesn't solve a problem. It completes a cultural narrative.

The same impulse produced the Mod Retro Chromatic — a Game Boy reproduction he spent fifteen years engineering, with a magnesium-aluminum alloy shell and a lab-grown sapphire screen. On Tetragrammaton:

It's been fun to build something that's a little more... You know, because it's delightful rather than because it solves some problem. There's no problem this solves, right?

Palmer LuckeyTetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin told him it was the Game Boy, not Oculus or Anduril, that made Rubin want to meet him. Luckey responded with his hiring philosophy:

What I want to see is the projects that you did that you weren't paid to do. That weren't part of your government-mandated high school education. What did you do in your own time with your own money that wouldn't have happened but for your care?

Palmer LuckeyTetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

The mech, the Game Boy, the speculative short stories, the anime Saturdays, the defense company itself — all expressions of a single drive: the need for certain things to exist in the world, independent of whether anyone has asked for them.

The Weight of It

There is a version of Palmer Luckey that could be dismissed as a boy who never stopped playing with toys. The record doesn't support it. He has thought carefully, and publicly, about what it means to turn fiction into weapons.

On fOx Hsiao, speaking to engineering students in Taiwan, he was asked directly about the Oppenheimer complex:

Matters of life and death are not like that. If you have people who are working on something who are not the very best people using the very best technology, you'll have people who die needlessly.

Palmer LuckeyfOx Hsiao

The challenge he lays down is stark: if you care about precision and civilian lives, you have two options — work on the problem yourself, or abdicate responsibility to people who are less competent and less ethical. He admitted that the weapons industry has historically been filled with people who don't lose sleep over misuse. That was part of why he got involved.

Working on weapons is not always fun, but if you really care about the ethics of it, you have to be involved.

Palmer LuckeyfOx Hsiao

On Bloomberg, he acknowledged that if AI becomes central to warfare, there will certainly be people killed by AI who should not have been. He does not dodge this. He argues that the alternative — dumb weapons, human error, the inability to distinguish a school bus from a tank — produces more death, not less. He frames the choice not as "AI weapons versus no weapons" but as "smart weapons versus dumb weapons".

And on the Skynet question — the existential risk argument that AI weapons inevitably escalate — he is not dismissive of AI risk generically, but of the military pathway to that risk specifically. The Department of Defense, he pointed out, ran its nuclear arsenal on floppy disks until recently. His real fear is elsewhere: bad people using good AI, and especially homebrew bioweapons — technologies that keep him up at night in ways that autonomous fighter jets do not.

The Choice He Made for Fiction's Sake

When Facebook fired him from Oculus, Luckey lost the company he'd built since he was fifteen. He was Oculus and Oculus was him — his entire adult life and most of his teenage years. He had every right to burn it all down publicly. Instead, on Bloomberg:

At the end of the day, I'm still a VR guy, I want VR to succeed. And me going out there and lighting everyone on fire for every mistake they make in trying to make VR happen is not going to make virtual reality more successful.

Palmer LuckeyBloomberg Live

And then:

For whatever differences I might have with them, they are one of the companies that has put more into VR than anybody in the world, and I don't want them to stop doing that.

Palmer LuckeyBloomberg Live

He chose the vision over the grievance. He subordinated personal justice to the project of making a fictional future real, even when the people carrying that project forward were the ones who had taken his company, stabbed him in the back, and thrown him out the back door.

Where This Leaves Us

The tension in Palmer Luckey's relationship with science fiction is real and unresolved. He reads fiction for blueprints but mourns the futures those blueprints can't deliver. He treats cautionary tales as narrative convention but admits he'll someday be Socrates — wrong about something he can't currently identify. He builds weapons from dreams and insists that the dreams are better served as inspiration than as warnings, while quietly conceding he doesn't know which warning he's currently ignoring.

He read the books. He decided they were blueprints. And now he builds — the mech that serves no tactical purpose alongside the fighter jet that does, the sapphire-screened Game Boy alongside the AI combat platform, the private short story alongside the public weapons system. All of it driven by the same conviction: that certain things need to exist in the world, and that the person who read the most books is obligated to make them real.