As you may have heard on the grapevine (for which read me standing on a soapbox yelling), Futures has a new anthology out. And if you haven’t heard that and bought your copy, where have you been??
Anyway, the medium of Twitter would have stopped this post in its tracks long ago for want of character space, which makes it, along with its sibling social media outlets, good for headlines but less good for detail.
As a result I thought it would be worth kicking back a little and talking specifics.
Futures 2 (and the number is a clue, there is a Futures 1 as well) collects together 100 stories from the Futures archive and presents them in a handy eBook format (together with an intro hastily scribbled on the back of a beer mat by yours truly). The stories represent the fairly eclectic style of Futures veering from dark comedy to android despair and taking in xenotransplantation, cerebral modification and artificial intelligence along the way.
The selection was agonized over by myself and co-editor, former Futures editor Henry Gee. Long into the night, we pored over the past few years’ output and were pleased to discover just how hard it was to draw up a short-list of 100 (which bodes well for a Futures 3 …). The cover art (reproduced here again, cos I can’t get enough of it, was done by long-term Futures artist Jacey.
The eBook (did I mention that it’s on sale now, RRP $3.99?) features a wide range of authors from the well known, to the just starting out — which pretty much sums up the philosophy at Futures of publishing stories from all walks of life (more in a forthcoming post if you want to write for Futures, though an e-mail to futures AT nature.com is always a good start).
Anyway, for those of you who would like to know exactly who these 100 authors are, here’s the full list (deep breath):
S. R. Algernon | Madeline Ashby | Neal Asher | Tony Ballantyne | Barrington J. Bayley | Elizabeth Bear | Jacey Bedford | Anatoly Belilovsky | Gregory Benford | David Berreby | Ananyo Bhattacharya | David G. Blake | Polenth Blake | Keith Brooke | Eric Brown | Tobias Buckell | Steve Carper | Sarah K. Castle | Priya Chand | Brenda Cooper | Robert Nathan Correll | Elizabeth Counihan | Kathryn Cramer | T. F. Davenport | Sean Davidson | Robert Dawson | Paul Di Filippo | Joe Dunckley | Peter J. Enyeart | Dan Erlanson | Ronald D. Ferguson | Simon Quellen Field | John Frizell | John Gilbey | David W. Goldman | Dan Gollub | John Grant | Richard P Grant | Preston Grassmann | Lee Hallison | Nye Joell Hardy | Merrie Haskell | Martin Hayes | Jeff Hecht | Tania Hershman | Ken Hinckley | Joses Ho | Taik Hobson | Kerstin Hoppenhaus | Gareth D Jones | Rahul Kanakia | James Patrick Kelly | Swapna Kishore | David Langford | Susan Lanigan | Tanith Lee | Shelly Li | Jessica May Lin | Marissa Lingen | Ken Liu | Clayton Locke | Steve Longworth | Michael W. Lucht | Nick Mamatas | David Marusek | William Meikle | Mark W. Moffett | John Moran | Neale Morison | Anand Odhav Naranbhai | Gareth Owens | Conor Powers-Smith | João Ramalho-Santos | Mike Resnick | Jennifer Rohn | H. E. Roulo | Alex Shvartsman | Amber D. Sistla | Mohamad Atif Slim | Matthew Sanborn Smith | Norman Spinrad | Vaughan Stanger | Philip T. Starks | Ian Stewart | Eric James Stone | Ian Randal Strock | Rachel Swirsky | Grace Tang | Julian Tang | Adrian Tchaikovsky | Igor Teper | Joost Uitdehaag | William T. Vandemark | Scott Virtes | Deborah Walker | Ian Watson | Ian Whates | Sylvia Spruck Wrigley | George Zebrowski | Stephanie Zvan