Hello? Testing, testing. Is thing on? Ah, there you are. Welcome to Future Conditional, the shiny new blog from Nature Futures.
Hopefully, you might already have noticed a few minor changes here at Nature Futures. First and foremost, we now have a lovely new homepage, where we can showcase our stories a little more attractively than before. Second, and almost as important, the new Futures anthology, Futures 2, has finally been released as an eBook, so you settle back with your favourite e-device and read 100 stunning stories from the Futures archive.
For those of you who are new around here, you may well be asking, this is all well and good, but who is this Nature Futures?
So, a quick potted history. Futures began as a flash of inspiration in the mind of Henry Gee, who by day sifts submissions in palaeontology and archaeology for the science journal Nature. (By night, when not avoiding the dog park, he has a tendency to amass book shelves and make sinister noises with his keyboard.) The idea was that with the end of the millennium fast approaching, it was a good time to take stock of the world and to find out what science-fiction aficionados thought the future might hold. Opening with a fanfare — and a story by Arthur C Clarke — Futures began its first series in the magazine on 4 November 1999.
Its original run was for just over a year, ably fulfilling its remit of seeing the millennium in in style. But something had happened … along the way Futures had begun to amass a group of devoted followers and it wasn’t too long before it was back in the magazine’s pages for a second series, running for two years to 2006. (If you happened to be out when all this was happening, fear not, as you can get 97 of the gems published back then collected together in the Futures 1 eBook.)
Briefly, Futures moved to its sister publication, the monthly journal Nature Physics, but by mid-2007, it was clear that the back page slot in Nature could only sensibly be filled by science-fiction stories and Futures was back, back, back — and we’ve not looked back since (partly because we’re slightly worried that we might be being followed …).
In among all of these events, Futures picked up the Best Science Fiction Publisher award from the European Science Fiction Society in 2005. Then, in 2011, Henry decided to step back from the front line on Futures, and I quickly cast myself as his natural successor, having spent years plotting and brooding (colleagues were often moved to ask why I insisted on having a cat on my lap when in the office, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been reprimanded for peals of demonic laughter and muttering in a sinister way). In truth, my subtle ploy of lulling everyone into a false sense of security by doing the production duties on almost every Futures page since 2005 had paid off.
Here in 2014, Future finds itself in an exciting place, with a fun bid to run microFutures, some of the shortest SF stories ever written under our belts, we have also made a welcome return to the pages of Nature Physics, giving us an extra outlet for our submissions. And we have also expanded into the world of social media, so you can keep up to date with all things Future on Facebook and Twitter.
So here we are, the smell of new paint just starting to subside from the new homepage, and a brand new blog from which to explore the world of science fiction. Here I hope not only to expose the convoluted machinations of my inner thoughts (be afraid — they keep me up at night), but also to delve into the various facets of things SF with guest posts from our authors and friends.
The future, as they say, starts here …