William Alexander is a National Book Award–winning Latinx author of unrealisms for young audiences. His novels include Goblin Secrets, Ambassador, and A Properly Unhaunted Place. He teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Will says that “On the Tip of My Tongue” “started to accumulate the moment that I found out about Lagrange points and wondered what we might be able to build in such places — either on purpose or improvisationally. I also strive to write about disability, accommodations, and adaptive tech as expansive possibilities rather than symbols of loss and limitation.”

K. Ancrum is the author of the award-winning thriller The Wicker King, a lesbian romance called The Weight of the Stars, and the Peter Pan–inspired thriller Darling. K. is a Chicago native passionate about diversity and representation in young adult fiction. She currently writes most of her work in the lush gardens of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“I wrote ‘Walk 153’ about loneliness, cross-generational friendships, and technology being used to bring people closer to their environments,” K. says. “Exploring the richness of the world through one-on-one travelers turns the YouTube-familiar GoPro experience into an intimate expression of care between the people who roam and the people who watch them.”

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award–winning author of around thirty novels and more than a hundred short stories. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

Bear says the inspiration to write “Twin Strangers” arose from “thinking about how integral social media and the ways we present ourselves online have become to our self-images. We’re so aware now of being on display all the time. In the future, we’re going to need to find ways to navigate the demands of being online and available and ‘seen’ semi-constantly with our need for privacy and a strong self-identity. As who we are when nobody is looking becomes more elusive, it also becomes more important.”

A. R. Capetta is an acclaimed and best-selling YA author of the strange, scientific, magical, mysterious, and queer, including the quantum physics–driven Entangled duet, The Lost Coast, The Heartbreak Bakery, Echo After Echo, the Brilliant Death duology, the Stranger Things novel Rebel Robin, and the best-selling Once & Future series, coauthored with their spouse, Cory McCarthy. For fun, they cowrote a paper with Dr. Julia J. C. Blau in the Journal of Creative Writing Studies on the perceptual science of storytelling, which is about as nerdy as it gets. A. R. Capetta teaches in the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

A. R. writes: “I’ve always been drawn to the search for life in the cosmos — and the idea that it might be so much closer, and weirder, than people imagine. To connect with life that didn’t originate on Earth, people will probably have to put aside a lot of assumptions and expectations. Which: good! Learning to decenter ourselves is key to many parts of existence, and I was fascinated to look at this on the species and planetary scales. Galileo discovered Jupiter’s moons four hundred years ago, but the possibility of going to Europa in the near future is both new and very real. These ideas came together in a science-driven epistolary exchange between two humans, which leads to even bigger adventures of connection.”

Charlotte Nicole Davis is the critically acclaimed author of the Good Luck Girls series and a graduate of the New School’s Writing for Children MFA program. She currently lives in Brooklyn and loves comic book movies and books with maps in the front.

Charlotte was inspired to write “Cadence” because “as I grow into my own nonbinary gender identity, the one thing I’ve always wished I could change about myself has been my voice. Queer people often talk about ‘gender envy’ — I get that whenever I hear a voice that’s the perfect combination of tenor and rasp. This got me thinking about a not-too-distant future where people could pick and choose customizations for themselves, almost like video game characters — which also got me thinking about some of the consequences of such technology.”

NasuĠraq Rainey Hopson is the author of the short story “The Cabin” in the award-winning collection Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America. She is a tribally enrolled Inupiaq, an illustrator, and an arctic gardener. She currently lives in Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska.

Nasuġraq says she wrote “The Weight of a Name” after looking for Inuit-centered and Inuit-written science fiction and finding the results slim to none. “Science fiction has always been my first love, mainly because it contains so much hope,” she says. “I found the world building in this short story to be incredibly rewarding mentally; to imagine our people in the future thriving and advancing was spiritually uplifting and healing.”

A.S. King is the author of more than a dozen novels that have garnered the Michael L. Printz Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and many other honors. Her titles include Switch, Dig, I Crawl Through It, and Please Ignore Vera Dietz. She is a passionate advocate for teenagers and their mental health. She lives in Pennsylvania.

A.S. writes: “For fifty years, I have watched technology advance while humans stagnate in old patterns and ideas. In one hundred years, we will have permanent lunar bases, paralysis reversal, and an array of brain implants, but toxic masculinity’s whims will still control women. ‘Smile River’ represents the conveyor belt of this history — the long line of women we’ve kept quiet with outdated bullshit.”

E.C. Myers won the Andre Norton Nebula Award for his first novel, Fair Coin, and is the author of the SOS Thriller series and the RWBY young adult books After the Fall, Before the Dawn, Fairy Tales of Remnant, and Roman Holiday. His short fiction has been published in various anthologies, including Mother of Invention, A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, Hidden Youth, and Kaleidoscope. He also writes for the serialized podcast Orphan Black: The Next Chapter.

About his story “The Cage,” he says, “I’m fascinated by how our surveillance society is increasingly affecting people’s lives and freedoms. The alarming prevalence of personal data online makes individuals vulnerable to harassment and exploitation, but it also holds everyone accountable for their beliefs and actions like never before. Meanwhile, social media empowers both ‘armchair detectives’ and law enforcement agencies to leverage this data — and even collaborate with each other — to expose hidden truths and bring criminals to justice. While potentially a powerful tool for positive change, surveillance and social media can be abused, like any technology, to manipulate audiences and shape new realities.”

Junauda Petrus-Nasah is a writer, soul sweetener, runaway witch, and performance artist of Black Caribbean descent, born and working on unceded Dakota land in Minneapolis. Her work centers around wildness, queerness, Black diasporic futurism, ancestral healing, sweetness, shimmer, and liberation. Her first YA novel, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, received a Coretta Scott King Honor. She is the cofounder with Erin Sharkey of Free Black Dirt, a Black experimental healing art collective. She is currently working on her second novel, Black Circus, set in the ’90s, about a young Black woman studying circus.

Junauda says, “As a Black child growing up, I had to learn how to decolonize my psyche around the negative ideas about Blackness. This world has perfected the commodification of Black culture while simultaneously oppressing, degrading, and criminalizing Black people and their existence. While the impact of Black culture and labor is sacred and central to the US, there is an unspoken caste system and a history of erasure. In ‘Melanitis,’ I wanted to contemplate this tension and center the very juicy and yummy experience of being Black despite living in a culture that doesn’t know how to love and honor us.”

Wade Roush is a technology journalist and audio producer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the host of the podcast Soonish, about the technology choices we can make in the present to create a better future, and the author of the nonfiction MIT Press book Extraterrestrials, about the history and science behind the idea of life on other worlds. Tasting Light is his second foray into anthology work; he also edited the 2018 edition of Twelve Tomorrows, a long-running hard sci-fi anthology series copublished by the MIT Press and MIT Technology Review magazine.

“I learned so much from the brilliant authors we recruited for this book, especially my coeditor, A. R. Capetta,” he says. “I think the writers have done exactly what we asked them to do — bewitch a new generation of young adult readers with hard science fiction — while also showing that there’s so much room for stories about characters with a variety of under-represented backgrounds and identities. One of these days, I’m going to have to follow their example and write some of my own sci-fi!”

Wendy Xu is an award-nominated illustrator and comics artist. She is the cocreator of Mooncakes, a young adult fantasy graphic novel published in 2019 by Lion Forge Comics/Oni Press. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and cat.

Wendy says, “I was inspired to write ‘The Memory of Soil’ after interviewing biologist Merlin Sheldrake about his book on fungi, Entangled Life, and our discussion that ensued about using better metaphors to communicate scientific understanding. I had never considered the living world to be, well, alive. We are taught in school that organisms (especially the small, invisible ones) are, more or less, automated machines rather than living things in their own right. A robot, in theory, is also a machine ruled by nothing more than algorithms and subroutines. But the nutty thing is, we don’t even know how certain artificial intelligences learn things. We humans make these machines, which in turn learn and grow, and we can’t even fathom why. All of these concepts coalesced into the idea of a very human girl, who has been taught her whole life that she is just a cog in a social machine, and a robot who wants to be more than that.”