Contributors

The future always wins

Leigh Alexander

Leigh Alexander covers the art and business of video games at Gamasutra.com and writes a monthly column on the culture surrounding games and gamers at Kotaku.com , as well as a monthly column on industry issues at EDGE Magazine. Her work has appeared in Slate, Variety , the Los Angeles Times, Paste and a host of other publications.

What’s next?
"The only answer I can think of is 'More internet'."

Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is a chartered engineer and a former teacher of maths and physics. Baxter published his first novel, Raft , in 1991. Since then he has written somewhere over forty books, mostly science fiction novels, and over a hundred short stories. He lives in Northumberland.

What’s next?
"A unified mankind, spitting, squalling, scratching, growing."

Simon Ings

Simon Ings is writing an anecdotal history of Soviet science under Stalin. His most recent novel, Dead Water , is set among the tramp lines and pirate syndicates operating on the Indian Ocean. He reviews popular science for The Telegraph and the Guardian .

What’s next?
"Creative writing will be aggressively promoted by the surveillance state and its study made compulsory for the over-sixteens."

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake , and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination , among others. Her new novel Maddaddam will be published in 2013. She has been alive since Flash Gordon was a pup and does not plan to have her head frozen for future reembodiment.

What’s next?
"A compulsory move to higher ground. And Chickie Nobs, in one form or another. Brain-free meat! No brain, no pain! Guilt-free muscle munching!"

M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison reviews fiction for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement . His novel Climbers received the Boardman Tasker Award in 1989; Nova Swing received the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2007. Gollancz publishes his new novel, Empty Space , in June 2012.

What’s next?
"Nothing good."

China Miéville

China Miéville is the author of several works of fiction, and has won the Hugo, World Fantasy and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. He lives and works in London.

What’s next?
"The rich will continue to Houdini their way out of taxes and close down the libraries. Unless we get our shit together."

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Sumit Paul-Choudhury edits New Scientist by day, acts as editor-in-chief of Arc by moonlight and wins mild acclaim for his fiction by night.

What’s next?
"The afterparty."

Hannu Rajaniemi

Hannu Rajaniemi approached the European Space Agency with a fusion-powered spaceship design at the age of eight. After completing a PhD in string theory at University of Edinburgh, he co-founded [ThinkTank Maths http://thinktankmaths.com/ ], a mathematics innovation company working in space, energy, financial services and defence. The Fractal Prince, a sequel to his first novel The Quantum Thief, is forthcoming.

What’s next?
"Things will appear just the same, unless you know how to look."

Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds turned to full-time writing in 2004, after a career in space science. His novels include the Clarke Award-nominated Revelation Space, Pushing Ice and House of Suns . His latest, Blue Remembered Earth , sees a spacefaring humanity emerge from a technologically resurgent Africa. In his spare time he messes around with guitars and horses.

What’s next?
"We’ll be tripping over robots."

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling is a novelist, technology journalist and teacher of industrial design. His most recent book is a collection of short stories titled Gothic High-Tech .

What’s next?
"Big cities full of old people who are afraid of the sky."

Simon Pummell

Simon Pummell works with moving images: features, animations, artist’s television, installation, and large-scale projections in live theatre. His recent feature Shock Head Soul premiered in the Orrizonti Section of the Venice Film Festival. The associated gallery installation The Sputnik Effect premieres this year at Rotterdam’s International Film Festival.

What’s next?
"The slow death of that old modernist faith in future utopias, and a loss of any purchase on the past, might force us to try living more fully in the present."

Paul Graham Raven

Paul Graham Raven is a research assistant specialising in infrastructural futures with the University of Sheffield’s Pennine Water Group. He consults on network culture and its second- and third-order societal effects. In other words, he worries about the future for a living.

What’s next?
"Resource-based conflict; the continuing decline of the nation-state; the rise of the corporation-state and the postnational citizen; yet more funny cat videos."

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is the author of more than a dozen science fiction novels, as well as histories and critical analyses of the genre. He is professor of nineteenth-century literature and culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent novel is By Light Alone .

What’s next?
"People used to think the world was flat; then they believed it to be round. I think what’s next is a hypercube – I’m looking forward to that."