by Ed Finn
What’s a goal that we could accomplish in the next ten years or twenty years? That was something that we had in previous generations. That was something that the cathedral builders had because they knew that ultimately they were going to finish building the cathedral, and it was going to be better than the cathedral in the city down the road.
PD: The spirit of the Apollo program was that it was deliverable within a human lifetime, and a big commitment, and everybody got behind it. It’s easy to imagine doing things like that now. I mean, I’ve mentioned there’s one way to Mars, but that’s maybe a bit harebrained. We could imagine great projects here on Earth that we could do—if there was the commitment, we could do it. What these projects need to do is, in my view, to be unifying and not part of a national competition. What we need is great projects that can bring people together.
imageZebra/Shutterstock, Inc.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. His research and teaching explore the ways ideas circulate through contemporary culture, especially in digital form, and he is currently working on a book about the changing nature of reading in the age of algorithms. He completed his Ph.D. in English and American literature at Stanford University. Before graduate school Ed worked as a journalist at Time, Slate, and Popular Science. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University with a comparative literature major and certificates in applications of computing, creative writing, and European cultural studies.
Kathryn Cramer is a writer, critic, and anthologist and was coeditor of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s Best SF series. She has coedited approximately thirty anthologies. She was a founding editor of the New York Review of Science Fiction and has a large number of Hugo nominations in the Semiprozine category to show for it. She won a World Fantasy Award for her anthology The Architecture of Fear (1987). Her fiction has been published by Asimov’s and Nature and in anthologies. Her story “Am I Free to Go?” was recently published on Tor.com. Kathryn holds a B.A. in mathematics and a master’s degree in American Studies, both from Columbia University in New York. For five years, she taught writing at Harvard Summer School. More recently she has been a consultant for Wolfram Research, L. W. Currey, an antiquarian bookseller, and for ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. She lives in Westport, New York, in the Adirondack Park.
EDITED BY KATHRYN CRAMER AND DAVID G. HARTWELL
Year’s Best SF 7
Year’s Best SF 8
Year’s Best SF 9
Year’s Best SF 10
Year’s Best SF 11
Year’s Best SF 12
Year’s Best SF 13
Year’s Best SF 14
Year’s Best SF 15
Year’s Best SF 16
Year’s Best SF 17
Year’s Best Fantasy
Year’s Best Fantasy 2
Year’s Best Fantasy 3
Year’s Best Fantasy 4
Year’s Best Fantasy 5
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
Charlie Jane Anders writes about science fiction for io9 and is the author of the novel Choir Boy (2005). She has contributed to Mother Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, Pindeldyboz, Strange Horizons, and many other publications. She is coeditor of the anthology She’s Such a Geek (2006) and published an indy magazine called other.
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and strategic foresight consultant based in Toronto. She is the author of vN (2012) and iD (2013), the first two novels in her Machine Dynasty series. Her fiction has appeared in Nature, FLURB, Tesseracts, Imaginarium, and Escape Pod. Her essays and criticism have appeared at Boing Boing, io9, WorldChanging, Creators Project, Arcfinity, and Tor.com.
Elizabeth Bear is a science fiction and fantasy author based in Massachusetts. In 2005 she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and she has also won two Hugo Awards, for Best Short Story and Best Novelette. Elizabeth is an instructor at the Viable Paradise science fiction and fantasy writers’ workshop and also teaches at Clarion, Clarion West, the WisCon Writer’s Respite, and Odyssey.
Gregory Benford is a science fiction author, educator, and astrophysicist. In addition to authoring more than twenty novels, Gregory is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 1971. He has served as a scientific consultant for Star Trek: The Next Generation, is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and is a contributing editor for Reason magazine.
David Brin is a scientist, bestselling author, and tech-futurist. His novels include Earth (1990), The Postman (1985, filmed in 1997), and Hugo Award winners Startide Rising (1983) and The Uplift War (1987). A leading commentator and speaker on modern trends, his nonfiction book The Transparent Society (1998) won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.
James L. Cambias is a science fiction author and game designer. His short stories have been featured in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Nature, and the Journal of Pulse-Pounding Narratives. He is a cofounder of Zygote Games, codesigned Bone Wards: The Game of Ruthless Paleontology, and has written or contributed to books for a number of tabletop role-playing games.
Brenda Cooper is a science fiction author, futurist, and technology professional. She is the chief information officer for the city of Kirkland, Washington, and a member of the Futurist Board for the Lifeboat Foundation. Brenda is the author of seven novels, including The Silver Ship and the Sea, which won the Endeavor Award in 2008.
Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and best-selling author. He is a regents’ professor, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and co-director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University. His award-winning books include The Eerie Silence (2010), The Goldilocks Enigma (2007), How to Build a Time Machine (2007), and The Mind of God (1992).
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger. He is the coeditor of Boing Boing and the author of young adult novels like Homeland (2013), Pirate Cinema (2012), and Little Brother (2008) and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds (2012) and Makers (2009). Cory is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.
Kathleen Ann Goonan is a science fiction author, educator, and critic. Her debut novel, Queen City Jazz (1994), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and her novel In War Times (2007) won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. She is a visiting professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Lee Konstantinou is a novelist and scholar of post-World War II U.S. fiction. He serves as associate editor for fiction and criticism at the Los Angeles Review of Books and is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. Lee is the author of the novel Pop Apocalypse (2009) and coeditor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012).
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author, and science popularizer. He is the founding director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University and the foundation professor at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration and Department of Physics. His most recent books include A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (2012), Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science (2010), and Hiding in the Mirror (2005).
Geoffrey A. Landis is a scientist and a science fiction writer. As a scientist, he is a researcher at the NASA John Glenn Research Center. He works on projects related to advanced power and propulsion systems for space and planetary exploration and is currently a member of the science team for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. As a science fiction writer, he has won a Nebula Award, two Hugo Awards, and a Locus Award, as well as
two Rhysling Awards for his poetry.
Annalee Newitz writes about science, pop culture, and the future. She is the editor in chief of io9, a publication that covers science and science fiction. She is the author of the books Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (2013) and Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (2006) and the coeditor of She’s Such a Geek (2006). Formerly, she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a Ph.D. in English and American Studies.
Rudy Rucker is a science fiction author, philosopher, mathematician, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement. He worked for twenty years as a computer science professor at San Jose State University and has published a number of software packages. His novels include Turing & Burroughs (2012), Jim and the Flims (2011), and Hylozoic (2009), as well as the Ware Tetralogy (1982–2000), a four-book cyberpunk series that won two Philip K. Dick awards.
Karl Schroeder divides his time between writing fiction and analyzing the future impact of science and technology on society. He is the author of nine novels and has pioneered a new mode of writing that blends fiction and rigorous futures research: Crisis in Zefra (2005) and Crisis in Urlia (2011) were commissioned by the Canadian army as research tools. Karl holds a master’s degree in strategic foresight and innovation from OCAD University in Toronto.
Vandana Singh is a science fiction author and assistant professor of physics at Framingham State College. Her short stories, which most recently include “Peripateia” (2013), “Cry of the Kharchal” (2013), “With Fate Conspire” (2013), and “A Handful of Rice” (2012), frequently appear in Year’s Best and other anthologies. She also writes poetry as well as novels and short stories for children.
Neal Stephenson is an author of historical and science fiction, a technology consultant, and the principal provocateur behind Project Hieroglyph. He is the author of the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (2003–2004) and the novels REAMDE (2012), Anathem (2008), Cryptonomicon (1999), The Diamond Age (1995), Snow Crash (1992), and Zodiac (1988). He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, editor, and critic. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, and introductions for books ranging from Ernst Juenger to Jules Verne. He is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, and in 2013 he was the Visionary in Residence at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.
CREDITS
Cover design by Adam Johnson
Cover artwork: Drawing of Original
Erlenmeyer Flask by Emil Erlenmeyer,
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons;
Background © Duncan1890/Istockphoto
COPYRIGHT
Selections from the anthology may appear online or in print through serial publication on the Project Hieroglyph website or elsewhere.
HIEROGLYPH: STORIES AND VISIONS FOR A BETTER FUTURE. Copyright © 2014 by Arizona State University. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPUB Edition September 2014 ISBN 9780062204707
ISBN 978-0-06-220469-1
14 15 16 17 18 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
COPYRIGHT NOTICES
Foreword by Lawrence M. Krauss. Copyright © 2014 Lawrence M. Krauss.
Preface: “Innovation Starvation” by Neal Stephenson. Copyright © 2011 Neal Stephenson. Previously published in World Policy Journal 28.3 (Thousand Oaks, CA: World Policy Institute in partnership with SAGE, September 2011), pp. 11-16. doi: 10.1177/0740277511425349.
Introduction: “A Blueprint for Better Dreams” by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. Copyright © 2014 Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer.
“Atmosphæra Incognita” by Neal Stephenson. Copyright © 2013 Neal Stephenson. An earlier version was published in Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, eds. James Benford and Gregory Benford (Lafayette, CA: Microwave Sciences, 2013), pp. 53–78.
“Girl in Wave : Wave in Girl” by Kathleen Ann Goonan. Copyright © 2014 Kathleen Ann Goonan.
“By the Time We Get to Arizona” by Madeline Ashby. Copyright © 2014 Madeline Ashby.
“The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Cory Doctorow. Copyright © 2014 CorDoc-Co, Ltd. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
“Johnny Appledrone vs. the FAA” by Lee Konstantinou. Copyright © 2014 Lee Konstantinou.
“Degrees of Freedom” by Karl Schroeder. Copyright © 2014 Karl Schroeder.
“Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy” by Annalee Newitz. Copyright © 2014 Annalee Newitz. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
“A Hotel in Antarctica” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Copyright © 2014 Geoffrey A. Landis.
“Periapsis” by James L. Cambias. Copyright © 2014 James L. Cambias.
“The Man Who Sold the Stars” by Gregory Benford. Copyright © 2013 Gregory Benford. Previously published in Starship Century: Toward the Grandest Horizon, eds. James Benford and Gregory Benford (Lafayette, CA: Microwave Sciences, 2013), pp. 129–162.
“Entanglement” by Vandana Singh. Copyright © 2014 Vandana Singh.
“Elephant Angels” by Brenda Cooper. Copyright © 2014 Brenda Cooper.
“Covenant” by Elizabeth Bear. Copyright © 2014 Sarah Wishnevsky.
“Quantum Telepathy” by Rudy Rucker. Copyright © 2014 Rudy Rucker. Previously published as the chapter “Qwet Rat” in The Big Aha (Los Gatos, CA: Transreal Books, 2014).
“Transition Generation” by David Brin. Copyright © 2014 David Brin.
“The Day It All Ended” by Charlie Jane Anders. Copyright © 2014 Charlie Jane Anders.
“Tall Tower” by Bruce Sterling. Copyright © 2014 Bruce Sterling.
Science and Science Fiction: An Interview with Paul Davies by Ed Finn and Paul Davies. Copyright © 2014 Ed Finn and Paul Davies.
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