Fifteen predictions, seventy years in the future. By 2084 the world we know is gone. These are stories from our world seven decades later. In 1948 George Orwell looked at the world around him and his response was 1984, now a classic dystopian novel. Here eleven writers asked themselves the same question as Orwell did – where are we going, and what is our future? Visit the dark corners of the future metropolis, trek the wastelands of all that remains. See the world through the eyes of drones. Put humanity on trial as the oceans rise. Say goodbye to your body as humanity merges with technology. Warnings or prophesies? Paradise or destruction? Will we be proud of what we have achieved, in 2084? Our future unfolds before us.
Authors
Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of wordplay and fantasy.He studied fine art and drama at Manchester University and was subsequently appointed writer in residence at the city's Royal Exchange theatre. But Noon did not stay too long in the theatrical world, possibly because the realism associated with the theatre was not conducive to the fantastical worlds he was itching to invent. While working behind the counter at the local Waterstone's bookshop, a colleague suggested he write a novel. The result of that suggestion, Vurt, was the hippest sci-fi novel to be published in Britain since the days of Michael Moorcock in the late sixties. Like Moorcock, Noon is not preoccupied with technology per se, but incorporates technological developments into a world of magic and fantasy. As a teenager, Noon was addicted to American comic heroes, and still turns to them for inspiration. He has said that music is more of an influence on his writing than novelists: he 'usually writes to music', and his record collection ranges from classical to drum'n'bass.
Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer. Their recent novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth was a British Fantasy, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Bram Stoker Award finalist. Their debut collection Breakable Things is now out.
Lavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu. Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist. Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy. He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012). Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie. His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century. Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011). Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012). He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog, and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there. He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers). Tidhar lives with his wife in London.
E. J. Swift is the author of The Osiris Project trilogy, a speculative fiction series set in a world radically altered by climate change, comprising Osiris, Cataveiro and Tamaruq. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies from Salt Publishing, NewCon Press and Jurassic London, including The Best British Fantasy (Salt Publishing, 2013 and 2014). Swift was shortlisted for a 2013 BSFA Award in the Short Fiction category for her story “Saga’s Children” (The Lowest Heaven, Jurassic) and was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for “The Spiders of Stockholm” (Irregularity, Jurassic).
UK writer who published four volumes of stories by the age of twenty-one – Thumbprints, which is mostly fantasy, Fools' Gold, Torn Air and The Paradise Equation, all as David Hutchinson – and then moved into journalism. The deftness and quiet humaneness of his work was better than precocious, though the deracinatedness of the worlds depicted in the later stories may have derived in part from the author's apparent isolation from normal publishing channels. After a decade of nonfiction, Hutchinson returned to the field as Dave Hutchinson, assembling later work in As the Crow Flies; tales like "The Pavement Artist" use sf devices to represent, far more fully than in his early work, a sense of the world as inherently and tragically not a platform for Transcendence. His first novel, The Villages, is Fantasy; The Push, an sf tale set in the Human Space sector of the home galaxy, describes the inception of Faster Than Light travel and some consequent complications when expanding humanity settles on a planet full of Alien life. Europe in Autumn (2014), an sf thriller involving espionage, takes place in a highly fragmented and still fragmenting Near-Future Europe, one of whose sovereign mini-nations is a transcontinental railway line; over the course of the central plot – which seems to reflect some aspects of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 – the protagonist becomes involved in the Paranoia-inducing Les Coureurs des Bois, a mysterious postal service which also delivers humans across innumerable borders.
- See more at: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/hutc... Works * The Villages (Holicong, Pennsylvania: Cosmos Books, 2001) * Europe in Autumn (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Rebellion/Solaris, 2014) Collections and Stories * Thumbprints (London: Abelard, 1978) * Fools' Gold (London: Abelard, 1978) * Torn Air (London: Abelard, 1980) * The Paradise Equation (London: Abelard, 1981) * As the Crow Flies (Wigan, Lancashire: BeWrite Books, 2004) * The Push (Alconbury Weston, Cambridgeshire: NewCon Press, 2009)
Anne Charnock's novel DREAMS BEFORE THE START OF TIME is the winner of the 2018 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was shortlisted for the BSFA 2017 Best Novel Award. Her latest novel, BRIDGE 108, is written in the same world as her debut novel, A CALCULATED LIFE—a finalist for the 2013 Philip K. Dick and The Kitschies Golden Tentacle Awards. SLEEPING EMBERS OF AN ORDINARY MIND, her second novel, was named by The Guardian as one of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2015 Anne Charnock's journalism has appeared in New Scientist, The Guardian, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and Geographical. She was educated at the University of East Anglia, where she studied Environmental Sciences, and at The Manchester School of Art, England where she gained a Masters in Fine Art. As a foreign correspondent, she travelled widely in Africa, the Middle East and India and spent a year overlanding through Egypt, Sudan and Kenya. http://www.annecharnock.com http://www.twitter.com/annecharnock Author photo by Marzena Pogorzaly
Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction. He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was made into a major production by Newmarket Films. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went straight to No.1 US box office. It received two Academy Award nominations. Other novels, including Fugue For a Darkening Island and The Glamour, are currently in preparation for filming. He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London. As a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.
I'm a university lecturer and researcher based in Canterbury, UK. For the most part, I write thoughtful, character-based science fiction thrillers with a philosophical edge, like 'Deja Vu', which has been republished by Unsung Stories. Déjà Vu won the Red Adept Science Fiction Award. Otherwise, I have been known to write comedy fiction. Drop me an email if you like: ihocking@gmail.com. I also maintain a mailing list for those interested in keeping up with my work.
