There’s been a growing movement within the science fiction community to imagine the future as something other than a dreary dystopia. That’s what Arizona State University is doing with a new digital anthology called Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures.
The book comes from the university’s Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI), which was founded in 2012 to bring together artists, scientists, and engineers to think about the future. CSI has produced similar anthologies in the past, including the Neal Stephenson-edited Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, which sought to recapture science fiction’s legacy of optimism.
Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities is all about the coming future of space travel, with stories from a fantastic lineup of authors: Madeline Ashby, Steven Barnes, Eileen Gunn, Ramez Naam, Carter Scholz, Karl Schroeder, and Vandana Singh. They write about the challenges of and intersections between public and private space travel, with stories set in low Earth orbit, Mars, the asteroid belt, and beyond. The book also includes an interview with New York 2140 author Kim Stanley Robinson, and a series of related essays.
The book is free to download in ePub, Mobi, iBook, and PDF formats, or you can order a physical paperback. There’s even a version aimed at kids and educators, which takes out the profanity.