Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn

(Paperback)

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Description

Assembling a remarkable roster of writers, Terraform has established itself by publishing short fiction seemingly ripped from tomorrow's headlines, speculative fiction about the very near future. Over the last six years, as science fiction itself has achieved a new kind of mainstream credibility and the media landscape has transformed entirely, Terraform has blazed an unexpected path that has seen short stories go viral and given fiction an unparalleled urgency and relevance. Drawing from established luminaries like Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow, rising stars, and surprising newcomers, Terraform stories are marked by their convincing engagement with the world that we just might live in, putting our most existential issues into startling dramatic context. Edited by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans, and divided here into three categories-Watch/Worlds/Burn-these stories take on surveillance (Watch), artificial intelligence (Worlds), and climate collapse (Burn).

Reviews

"This is the kind of book we need now, a collection of stories bursting with visions, ideas, nightmares, and utopian plans, all in the aid of creating cognitive maps for navigating the very difficult future that is coming. When dread and joy combine, what is that Excitement Read this and see what you think."
--Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy and The Ministry for the Future

"Someday a future intelligence will find this, washing up on shore or archived on a server farm deep underground or drifting as ones and zeros through space, and they'll have a document of who we were, who we are, and who we imagined we might be. This anthology is filled with work from brilliant writers, new and familiar, and out of their anxieties come nightmares and dreams, an assortment of stories that is equal parts terrifying and entertaining."
--Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Interior Chinatown

"Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn is through and through Luddite science fiction: critical not cynical, perceptive not preachy, imaginative not derivative, but above all else rooted in the idea that the world we've made is a world we can unmake."
--Edward Ongweso Jr., cohost of This Machine Kills

"Be careful. These stories may burn you with their scalding visions of other worlds and alternate tomorrows."
--Annalee Newitz, author Autonomous, The Future of Another Timeline, and Four Lost Cities

"It will radicalize you."
--Cory Doctorow, from the introduction

"This showcase of today's leading imaginations offers enough vivid cautionary tales to make even the most optimistic tech utopian hesitate...While the tone throughout tends toward the bleak and searing, hope shines through."
--Publishers Weekly

"Read these short, biting, vibrant stories for their wit, inventiveness, and verve."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Author Bio

Brian Merchant is the senior editor of Motherboard, VICE's science and technology outlet, and a founding editor of Terraform. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Slate, VICE, Salon, Fast Company, Discover, GOOD, Paste, Grist, and elsewhere. Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is a founding editor of Terraform, the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to The Guardian, WIRED, and Aeon; previously, she was a contributor to Grantland and wrote National Geographic's popular culture and science blog Universe. She is an adviser to design students at the Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.