The Future is Made of Choices
We seem inevitably drawn to two opposites when we tell stories about the future: will we finally reach a rationalist techno-utopia, or will we sow the seeds of our own destruction by innovating too aggressively? These extremes tempt us because they provide finality, and hence they scratch our itch for neatly packaged narratives where all the loose ends are carefully tied up. But they don’t reflect how we encounter technologies in our everyday lives, or the history of actual technological change, which is always heterogeneous, ambivalent, growing out of and elaborating on our existing social structures and norms, cultures and values, and physical environments. There are no fresh beginnings or clean endings in real life. We don’t get to terra-form our planet and start over; the forces of evil probably won’t wear highly visible insignia and matching uniforms. Instead, technologies as profound as personal computers, solar panels, and pacemakers and as mundane as toasters and headphones insinuate themselves gradually into our markets, our relationships, and even our sense of who we are.
Living with technology is profoundly weird. One year you have to drive to the next state or post a letter to talk to your sister or father, and the next you’re able to summon them up instantly with the ring of a telephone. A few decades later, you’re texting them the palm tree or mermaid emoji from the back seat of your rideshare as shorthand for “good morning” or “thinking of you.” A few months after that, you find out that your own government might be monitoring these exchanges. Technologies deform existing social arrangements, not invalidating or erasing them but twisting them into unexpected shapes—and thereby provoking new feelings, allowing new thrills, eliciting new anxieties, opening up new vulnerabilities, creating new opportunities for self-expression, commerce, connection, and conflict. We get used to these changes quite quickly, and once we do, they become unremarkable, even invisible. A good science fiction story can help re-sensitize us by showing us people dangling over different technological precipices, or realizing their potential in once-unimaginable ways.
It’s the pursuit of this strangeness, this destabilizing feeling of cohabitating on our planet with multitudes of technologies seen and unseen, that inspires us at Future Tense Fiction. The project grew out of Future Tense, a collaboration among Slate, Arizona State University, and New America. Since 2010, we have been publishing nonfiction commentary and hosting events about emerging technologies and their transformative effects on public policy, culture, and society. We started experimenting with publishing fiction on Slate’s Future Tense channel in 2016, with Paolo Bacigalupi’s disturbing, incisive robots-and-IP-law detective thriller “Mika Model,” and then in early 2017, with Emily St. John Mandel’s wistful, uncanny time-travel yarn “Mr. Thursday.” In 2018, cheered by the enthusiastic reactions of our readers and keen to work with some of our favorite authors, we started publishing one story per month, accompanied by a response essay by someone with expertise in a related area (from theoretical physics to food systems) and original illustrations.
We view Future Tense Fiction as an urgent corollary to our nonfiction efforts. Fiction has the ability to transport us into a panoply of possible visions of the future, and to grasp at the weirdness of our pervasive interactions with science and technology through the eyes of people with identities and experiences entirely unlike our own. Stories evoke our empathy, allowing us to tunnel into someone’s psychology, emotions, and worldview—and to viscerally experience the consequences, both desired and dreaded, expected and unforeseen, of living in a technological world in perpetual flux.
The future isn’t a fixed path, or a chute through which we’re helplessly propelled. We make the future together through an agglomeration of choices small and large, minute and momentous: whether and how to vote, which technologies to buy and adopt and which ones to skip entirely, how and where we live, how we get around, how we construct our families, where we work and what we work on. We’re all constrained to various degrees by a dizzying array of social factors, but we do have decisions to make. And doing nothing in the face of scientific and technological change is a decision too. We hope that Future Tense Fiction stories help us imaginatively rehearse possible future scenarios, and help us get better at recognizing places where things could be different, even when they’re hard to glimpse. Scientific and technological elites and leaders often present the future as a fait accompli. A good story can help us find a different point of view, to scout out the decision points so that we can muster our resources and act at the right moment.
This volume collects a full year of Future Tense Fiction, exploring quarterly themes like home, memory, sport, and work. It can be both tricky and rewarding, with such a range of topics, and such a stylistically diverse set of contributing authors, to tease out commonalities running through our first year of Future Tense Fiction. Instead of doing so ourselves here, we invite you to proceed on your own journey of discovery, to help us think constructively about our shared future.
In these stories, the future is a place where the concerns of short stories still matter: individual people living their lives not in black and white but the same stubborn blend of grays that we encounter today. Life in the future, in short, will not be so different from life today. The human choices we make will be inflected by technology, but ultimately we are the ones who will have to live with their consequences. We are also the ones who will have to make sense of them, telling stories and narrating ourselves into identities, communities, and societies that feel like they really matter. That is the essential role of fiction—to help us inhabit other worlds, and other minds, so that we can better understand our own.
—The Future Tense Editors
Kirsten Berg, Torie Bosch, Joey Eschrich,
Ed Finn, Andrés Martinez, and Juliet Ulman