FUTURE TENSE FICTION

A diverse
group of contemporary authors imagine our shared future in these
speculative tales.

These
14 stories peer into a variety of futures only just visible from where we
stand. Many imagine solutions to pressing contemporary emergencies (climate
change, overpopulation, economic inequality) and then, in the way of all the
best literature, seek out the complications in that perfect picture. In Nnedi
Okorafor’s “Mother of Invention,” the Niger Delta has been transformed into a
nation-sized plantation of the “innovative air-scrubbing superplant known as
periwinkle grass,” which simultaneously solves the earth’s CO2 emissions
problem and strikes a blow against world hunger with its
versatile seeds. The only problems are the “pollen tsunamis” and the resultant
deadly allergic condition that strikes the story’s protagonist in the final
days of her pregnancy. In Charlie Jane Anders’ “The Minnesota Diet,” the
“cutting-edge ‘Smart-City’ of New Lincoln” is a fantasy land of
predicative-software enhanced, zero-carbon-footprint urban living. But when an
agricultural collapse necessitates the reprioritization of food shipments, the
entire city of “midlevel computer engineers, quality-control experts, content
creators, architects, marketing experts, musical theater geeks and service
workers” is deemed redundant, and starvation sets in.
Other stories start with our current time’s most pressing moral issues and
imagine them worse. In Madeline Ashby’s “Domestic Violence,” smart
homes—programmed to surveil, predict, and protect—become another tool in a
domestic abuser’s arsenal. Mark Stasenko’s “Overvalued” imagines the endgame
of skyrocketing college tuition costs as a complex industry of Wall Street-style investments, where the future of promising underprivileged youth is
heavily leveraged on the competitive market. A standout story by Carmen Maria
Machado sees a young girl exposed to the vast simultaneity of time in a fashion
more lyric than the rest of the anthology’s offerings. The charming “When Robot
and Crow Saved East St. Louis,” by Annalee Newitz, interjects both humor and
hope. Science fiction has long been the great equalizer in the American
literary landscape—capable of imagining more inclusive futures even as it
struggles to represent them equitably on its pages. Because of the
diversity of its authorship, this anthology does more than imagine what the
world might be like if all of our perspectives were included. Instead, it moves
past the picture of representation to a clear, uncompromising, imaginative look
at just what it is we are all included in.

Provocative, challenging
stories that project the tech innovations of today onto the moral framework of
tomorrow.