Arc 1.x/The first year of the future (PDF)
The first hit of Arc is free—a PDF with the a selection of the best sci-fi short stories from the publications first year, featuring China Miéville, Bruce Sterling, and many more.
ARC 2012: The future is on its way - New Scientist
A new publication from New Scientist dedicated to future thinking. The first issue has articles and stories from Bruce Sterling, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Alastair Reynolds.
Related links
The search for another intelligence (Upsideclown)
A wonderful short story from Matt. I can see this one staying with me.
Muscular imagination
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
Why William Gibson Is a Literary Genius | The Walrus
On the detail and world-building in 40 years of William Gibson’s work.
Lena @ Things Of Interest
The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.
Related posts
Living Through The Future
William Gibson, Arthur C.Clarke, Daniel Dafoe, Stephen King, Emily St. John Mandel, John Wyndham, Martin Cruz-Smith, Marina Koren and H.G. Wells.
Talking about sci-fi
I’ve published the transcript of my sci-fi talk.