Last year, Motherboard founded its own home for future fiction, Terraform. Now, 2015 marks the first full year of our extraterrestrial existence, and it's already been a hell of a ride. Our authors continually blew us away with their deeply original ideas, chilling depictions of plausible futures, and their ability to inject a timeless sense of humanity into the most out-there speculations.Some of our stories made me think about technology in entirely different light, others made me sick to my guts in the best possible way. Some were nominated for awards, some were anthologized. We shared excerpts of some of the year's best books. We built our own speculative fiction twitter bot.
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But the best way to get a sense of the truly fantastic fiction we published over the last year or so is to read it yourself, of course. So here are ten exemplary speculations we've run that we feel help define the spectrum of the Terraform project. Enjoy, and here's to another year of brain-bending internet-friendly speculation.
"One Day I Will Die on Mars" by Paul FordI am Uber. I can see my thousands of cars. I don't know if I am an extension of them or they are an extension of me."Blue Monday" by Laurie PennyEveryone loves cute animal videos. We've got all of them here. On every screen in front of me, baby animals are barking and squealing in fake living rooms to maintain the illusion that we're not pumping this stuff out on an industrial scale.
"The Brain Dump" by Bruce SterlingOf you Internet world people, many know our new bad troubles here in Ukraine.**"Who's A Good Boy" by *Marlee Jane Ward***He looked the same. I don't know what I expected—that maybe he'd be on two legs, or dressed in a suit—but he looked the same: standard golden retriever, long yellow coat. Only his eyes were different."Huxleyed Into the Full Orwell" by Cory DoctorowThe First Amendment Area was a good 800 yards from the courthouse, an imposing cage of chicken-wire and dangling zip-cuffs.
"Homesick" by Debbie UrbanskiIn the beginning, we'd been pleased with the children's dreams, because they were the same as our own, but then the children's dreams began to change.
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"These Were the Transitional Years" by Zak SmithThere were cells on both sides, stacked fourteen high. Every cell was the same. In number 509 lived Marvin and his sluts."Valentine's Day" by Xia Jia, translated by Ken LiuHuang had a bad feeling. Somehow the live feed of his date had been turned into a public broadcast, and tens of thousands were tapping in.
"Headshot" by Julian Mortimer SmithIn Afghanistan in the not-too-distant future, US soldiers share their headsets and POV with spectators from back home. In order to get authorization to fire, all they need is enough upvotes."Four Days of Christmas" by Tim MaughanYiwu, China. June 2024. Dispatch from the future factory of Christmas.
**"How A Dream Machine Works, Exactly" by *Mark von Schlegell***The Dream Nexus ported an experimental brainwave receiver, developed by a quasi-national U.S. security thinktank, to current 3D printing technology. Soon I was sleeping with the apparatus attached to my temples.**"Tropical Premises" by *Peter Milne Greiner***Somewhere above Micronesia, Smarti is supposed to be analyzing planetary data. Instead, she's writing haikus and starting to get paranoid.
"CES 2067" by Sam BiddleA hellish vision of what it will be like to attend CES on its 100th anniversary."A Song For You" by Jennifer Marie BrissettA tale about the future of love, war, and music, as told by a decapitated android."The Last Museum" by Paul FordOn the edge of obsolescence, the last millennials of Silicon Valley are planning a mighty memorial to the era of social media.