Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow

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.

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, a site about science fiction, science and futurism, and she organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series. 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.