Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow

Hannu Rajaniemi, Meg Elison, Annalee Newitz discuss their contributions to Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrowwith editor Torie Bosch.

About Future Tense Fiction

Future Tense Fiction is a collection of electrifying original stories from a veritable who’s-who of the most interesting authors working on the margins of speculative literature and science fiction.

Featuring Carmen Maria Machado, Emily St. John Mandel, Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Madeline Ashby, Mark Oshiro, Meg Elison, Maureen McHugh, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Hannu Rajaniemi, Annalee Newitz, Lee Konstantinou, and Mark Stasenko–Future Tense Fiction points the way forward to the fiction of tomorrow.

A disease surveillance robot whose social programming gets put to the test. A future in which everyone receives universal basic income–but it’s still not enough. A futuristic sport, in which all the athletes have been chemically and physically enhanced. An A.I. company that manufactures a neural bridge allowing ordinary people to share their memories. Brimming with excitement and exploring new ideas, the stories collected by the editors of Slate’s Future Tense are philosophically ambitious and haunting in their creativity. At times terrifying and heartwrenching, hilarious and optimistic, this is a collection that ushers in a new age for our world and for the short story.

Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the novel Autonomous, nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, she’s written for the Washington Post, Slate, Ars Technica, the New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. Her book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinctionwas a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. She was the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. She has published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley. Her new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, comes out September 2019.

Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Herdebut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K.Dick award. Her second novel was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick,and both were longlisted for the James A. Tiptree award. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she’s running out of time.

Hannu Rajaniemi is the author of four novels including The Quantum Thief(winner of 2012 Tähtivaeltaja Award for the best science fiction novel published in Finland and translated into more than 20 languages), and Invisible Planets, a short story collection. His most recent book is Summerland, an alternate history spy thriller in a world where the afterlife is real. His short fiction has been featured in Slate, MIT Technology Review and the New York Times. Hannu lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a co-founder and CEO of HelixNano, a venture- and Y Combinator–backed biotech startup.

Torie Bosch is the editor of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. She was also the co-editor of the 2017 edition of What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent the Future (The Unnamed Press).