Future Tense Fiction

Future Tense Fiction is a collection of electrifying original stories from a veritable who's-who of authors working in speculative literature and science fiction today. Featuring Carmen Maria Machado, Emily St. John Mandel, Charlie Jane Anders, Nnedi Okorafor, Paolo Bacigalupi, Madeline Ashby, Mark Oshiro, Meg Elison, Maureen F. 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 heart-wrenching, hilarious and optimistic, this is a collection that ushers in a new age for our world and for the short story.
A partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University, Future Tense explores how emerging technologies will change the way we live, in reality and fiction. Future Tense Fiction is a collection of original fiction commissioned by the partnership.
About the Author:
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus and Crawford awards and was on Time Magazine's list of the 10 best novels of 2016. Her Tor.com story "Six Months, Three Days" won a Hugo Award and appears in a new short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Wired Magazine, Slate, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Asimov's Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. She was a founding editor of io9.com, and she organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series and co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct with Annalee Newitz. Her first novel, Choir Boy, won a Lambda Literary Award.

Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and strategic foresight consultant living in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series from Angry Robot Books, and the novel Company Town from Tor Books, which was a Canada Reads finalist. As a futurist, she has developed science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, the Atlantic Council, Data & Society, InteraXon, and others. Her essays have appeared at BoingBoing, io9, WorldChanging, Creators Project, Arcfinity, MISC Magazine, and FutureNow. She is married to horror writer and journalist David Nickle. With him, she is the co-editor of Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond, an anthology of Bond stories available only in Canada. You can find her at madelineashby.com and on Twitter @MadelineAshby.

Paolo Bacigalupi's writing has appeared in WIRED Magazine, Slate, Medium, Salon.com, and High Country News, as well as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. His short fiction been nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year. It is collected in Pump Six and Other Stories, a Locus Award winner for Best Collection and also a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. His debut novel The Windup Girl was named by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and also won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards. He is also the author of Ship Breaker, The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, The Doubt Factory, The Water Knife, and Tool of War.

Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her debut 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 UC Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she's running out of time.

Lee Konstantinou is a writer and Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is also a Humanities editor at LARB. He's written fiction, criticism, and reviews. He wrote the novel Pop Apocalypse (Ecco/HarperPerennial, 2009) and co-edited (with Sam Cohen) The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press, 2012). Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.

Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper's Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

Maureen F. McHugh grew up in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and a New York Times Editor's Choice. She was a Finalist for the Story Award for "Mothers & Other Monsters," and won a Shirley Jackson Award for her collection After the Apocalypse. After the Apocalypse was also named one of Publishers Weekly's 10 Best Books of 2011. McHugh teaches scriptwriting at the University of Southern California. She and her husband and two dogs used to live next to a dairy farm. Sometimes, in the summer, black and white Holsteins looked over the fence at them. Now she lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is trying desperately to sell her soul to Hollywood but as it turns out, the market is saturated.

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 Extinction was 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.

Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy and magical realism. Born in the US to Nigerian immigrant parents, Okorafor is known for weaving African cultures into creative settings and memorable characters. Her books include Lagoon (a British Science Fiction Association Award finalist for best novel), Who Fears Death (a World Fantasy Award winner for best novel), Kabu Kabu (a Publisher's Weekly best book for Fall 2013), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature) and The Shadow Speaker (a CBS Parallax Award winner). Her 2016 novel The Book of Phoenix was an Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist, while the first book in her Binti Trilogy won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella. Her children's book Chicken in the Kitchen won an Africana Book Award. She is a full professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of two novels and his fiction has appeared in five different book collections. His novel After the Flare won the 2018 Philip K. Dick special citation award, and was chosen as one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Syfy.com, Tor.com, Kirkus Reviews, among others. His novel Nigerians in Space, a thriller about brain drain from Africa, was published by Unnamed Press in 2014. He is currently the Head of Social Impact at the audio technology company Sonos and a Future Tense Fellow at New America.

Mark Oshiro is the Hugo-nominated writer of the online Mark Does Stuff universe (Mark Reads and Mark Watches), where they analyze book and TV series. Anger is a Gift is their debut YA novel. It was honored with the 2019 Schneider Family Book Award for Best Teen Book and is a 31st Annual Lammy Awards finalist in the LGBTQ Children's/Young Adult category.

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.

Emily St. John Mandel's fifth novel, The Glass Hotel, will be published in spring 2020. Her previous novels include Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 32 languages. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Mark Stasenko is a television writer who wrote on the Peabody Award-winning show American Vandal. He is in development on a series about Enron with Alex Gibney attached to direct and is adapting the Future Tense Fiction short story "Overvalued" into a TV series with Universal Cable Productions.