Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn

by Brian Merchant, various authors, Claire L. Evans, Vivienne Leheny (Read by), Mark Bramhall (Read by)

Overview

An anthology of near future science fiction from VICE’s acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination, Terraform―in print for the first time.

Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we’re hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next.

Section by section―Watch/Worlds/Burn―the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents―from Bruce Sterling, Ellen Ullman, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, and Omar El Akkad, to E. Lily Yu, Elvia Wilk, Fernando Flores, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Gus Moreno―it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence, and takes them to unsettling dimensions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798212271332
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	10/11/2022
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Brian Merchant is a writer and editor focusing on culture and technology, living in Los Angeles. He is the author of the forthcoming book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech and the national bestseller The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture. She is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet and the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an adviser to graduate design students at ArtCenter College of Design.

Mark Bramhall has won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration, more than thirty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has repeatedly been named by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly among their “Best Voices of the Year.” He is also an award-winning actor whose acting credits include off-Broadway, regional, and many Los Angeles venues as well as television, animation, and feature films. He has taught and directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

Kyla Garcia is a film, stage, and television actress based in Los Angeles, California. She has earned an Audie Award nomination and seven AudioFile Earphones Awards for her work as an audiobook narrator. Her favorite storytelling moments include being a company member of Native Voices at the Autry, starring in the World Premiere of Sovereignty at Arena Stage, and creating the critically acclaimed one-woman show The Mermaid Who Learned How to Fly. Kyla's most recent project is the original feminist spoken-word digital series Herstory 101 featured in BUST Magazine.

Marisa Calin is an actress, narrator, and novelist born in England and educated in New York at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts. An artist with a flair for everything literary, she has written a young adult novel, You & Me, which received a Kirkus Starred Review, and has narrated the audio books Ruby Red and Sapphire Blue by Kerstin Gier.

After ten years of being on the "other side of the business" as a franchised talent agent, Meghan Kelly decided to pursue her own performance aspirations. She now works full-time as a narrator, voice-over artist, and singer. Meghan, a proud member of SAG/AFTRA, is a versatile actress who draws from a huge emotional pool to bring a variety of characters to life in the 300-plus titles she has narrated. She specializes in bringing the emotional truth to every story. Meghan's sound: She can be warm and friendly, young and sassy, flighty and ditsy, mature and professional, and of course sultry and sexy! She is very good with taking direction and doing a read several different ways.

Cary Hite has performed in several theaters across the country as a cast member in the longest-running African American play in history, The Diary of Black Men. He also appeared in Edward II, Fences, Macbeth, Good Boys, Side Effects May Vary, and the indie feature The City Is Mine. He has voiced several projects for AudibleKids, including Souls Look Back in Wonder, From Slave Ship to Freedom Road, and Papa, Do You Love Me?

Eunice Wong is an award-winning, Juilliard-trained actor who works in professional theatres across the United States and in New York City.

Hillary Huber is a multiple Audie Award finalist, an Earphones Award winner, and an AudioFile Best Voice. She has recorded over three hundred titles spanning many genres and holds a bachelor's degree in English literature. A voracious reader and listener, she was raised in Connecticut and Hawaii but now splits her time between California and New York.

Chris Henry Coffey is a film and television actor known for his role in David Schwimmer’s film, Trust. He has also had roles on Broadway, including the play Bronx Bombers. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.

Rasha Zamamiri is an actress, a singer, and a voiceover artist who was born in the Middle East and raised all over the world. She has a vast knowledge of cultures, customs, and religions, which have helped her character portrayals on stage, on TV, and in the booth. She was also the first Muslim featured in a national commercial wearing the hijab, which was televised during the Super Bowl, Olympics, and multiple national events.

Bahni Turpin is an experienced audiobook narrator and actress who has appeared in numerous television productions as well as films. An ensemble member of the Cornerstone Theater Company, she also works as a yoga instructor. She currently resides in Los Angeles, where she founded the SoLA Food Co-op.

Graham Halstead is a Brooklyn-based actor and voice artist. His voice work includes animation, commercials, and Audie and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narration. His work in the theater includes performances in New York, regionally in Washington DC, and internationally in Edinburgh and London. His most recent television work can be seen on AMC.

Stefan Rudnicki is an award winning audiobook narrator, director and producer. He was born in Poland and now resides in Studio City, California. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks and has participated in over a thousand as a writer, producer, or director. He is a recipient of multiple Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as a Grammy Award, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Ray Bradbury Award. He received AudioFile’s award for 2008 Best Voice in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Along with a cast of other narrators, Rudnicki has read a number of Orson Scott Card's best-selling science fiction novels. He worked extensively with many other science fiction authors, including David Weber and Ben Bova. In reviewing the twentieth anniversary edition audiobook of Card’s Ender's Game, Publishers Weekly stated, "Rudnicki, with his lulling, sonorous voice, does a fine job articulating Ender's inner struggle between the kind, peaceful boy he wants to be and the savage, violent actions he is frequently forced to take." Rudnicki is also a stage actor and director.

Janina Edwards, a graduate of New York University's Tisch Schools of the Arts, recorded her first audiobook in 1987. She was born in Chicago, soaked in New York City's African and West Indian accents for 11 years, and for the past twenty years has swum in the swagger of the south (Atlanta, Georgia). As a result, she excels in portraying authentic characters and voices the African Diaspora. Her 2018 audiobook, The Wedding Date, is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, and Voice of Freedom (2016, Dreamscape) was an Audie Award finalist. In addition to narrating audiobooks, she is a certified yoga teacher, sings kirtan, and plays the violin.


Chelsea Stephens has a longtime love and appreciation for the performing arts, with experience in on-stage acting, singing, and voice-over. Her love for reading books and the pursuit of the story led her to narration. She enjoys unfolding characters and bringing listeners into new worlds.

Chelsea is an experienced voice actor with a talent for mystery, sci-fi, and YA novels. She's a mom to a gaggle of young ones living in the Midwest with her lumber sexual husband.

Feodor Chin, an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an actor classically trained at the American Conservatory Theater and UCLA. His acting career includes numerous credits in film, television, theater, and voice-over.

Tim Campbell is the Audie and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning voice of hundreds of audiobook titles in almost every literary genre.

Editorial Reviews

Be careful. These stories may burn you with their scalding visions of other worlds and alternate tomorrows.”

author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History o Annalee Newitz

Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn is through and through Luddite science fiction: critical, not cynical; perceptive, not preachy; imaginative, not derivative; but above all else, rooted in the idea that the world we’ve made is a world we can unmake.”

cohost of This Machine Kills Edward Ongweso Jr.

This is the kind of book we need now, a collection of stories bursting with visions, ideas, nightmares, and utopian plans, all in the aid of creating cognitive maps for navigating the very difficult future that is coming. When dread and joy combine, what is that? Excitement? Read this and see what you think.”

Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Kim Stanley Robinson

Someday a future intelligence will find this, washing up on shore or archived on a server farm deep underground or drifting as ones and zeros through space, and they’ll have a document of who we were, who we are, and who we imagined we might be. This anthology is filled with work from brilliant writers, new and familiar, and out of their anxieties come nightmares and dreams, an assortment of stories that is equal parts terrifying and entertaining.”

National Book Award–winning author Charles Yu

04/11/2022

Merchant and Evans, the editors of Vice’s science fiction vertical, Terraform, whose mandate is to publish work at “the front lines of tomorrow,” bring 52 Terraform stories to print for the first time in this impressive anthology. They collect plausible scenarios like Laurie Penny’s bitterly clever “Blue Monday,” in which a worker at an animal-video content factory hatches a plan to rescue her stolen cat, and E. Lily Yu’s “The Wretched and the Beautiful,” about the all too real fate of a ship of alien refugees that crash-lands at an expensive beach resort. Alongside these are larger leaps ahead, such as Marlee Jane Ward’s heartbreaking “Who’s a Good Boy,” in which dogs can be upgraded to full humanlike consciousness, and far-future tales that merely glance at the present, like Tlotlo Tsamaase’s “Virtual Snapshots,” where a woman travels from her life support facility to visit her sick mother. While the tone throughout tends toward the bleak and searing, hope shines through in Sarah Gailey’s welcoming “Drones to Ploughshares,” about agricultural robots starting new lives, and Shannon Chamberlain’s “Reunion,” in which a Mexican adoptee finds an unexpected friend in a transport drone. This showcase of today’s leading imaginations offers enough vivid cautionary tales to make even the most optimistic tech utopian hesitate. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

This is the kind of book we need now, a collection of stories bursting with visions, ideas, nightmares, and utopian plans, all in the aid of creating cognitive maps for navigating the very difficult future that is coming. When dread and joy combine, what is that? Excitement? Read this and see what you think.”
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy and The Ministry for the Future

“Someday a future intelligence will find this, washing up on shore or archived on a server farm deep underground or drifting as ones and zeros through space, and they’ll have a document of who we were, who we are, and who we imagined we might be. This anthology is filled with work from brilliant writers, new and familiar, and out of their anxieties come nightmares and dreams, an assortment of stories that is equal parts terrifying and entertaining.”
—Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Interior Chinatown

“Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn is through and through Luddite science fiction: critical not cynical, perceptive not preachy, imaginative not derivative, but above all else rooted in the idea that the world we’ve made is a world we can unmake.”
—Edward Ongweso Jr., cohost of This Machine Kills

“Be careful. These stories may burn you with their scalding visions of other worlds and alternate tomorrows.”
—Annalee Newitz, author Autonomous, The Future of Another Timeline, and Four Lost Cities

“It will radicalize you.”
—Cory Doctorow, from the introduction

"This showcase of today’s leading imaginations offers enough vivid cautionary tales to make even the most optimistic tech utopian hesitate...While the tone throughout tends toward the bleak and searing, hope shines through."
—Publishers Weekly

"Read these short, biting, vibrant stories for their wit, inventiveness, and verve."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

★ 2022-05-25
Dispatches from the hyperconnected, hypersurveilled future.

The editors of this SF anthology bill it as a “full, visceral, and vital portrait of a world in rapid evolution,” and in many ways the collection delivers on that promise. Like all the best science fiction, these stories look at our present through the lens of some possible futures. Key themes emerge, including surveillance capitalism, artificial intelligence, and climate change. The world we see here is hyperconnected and yet uber-alienating, full of potential for ever shinier tech but lacking much opportunity for genuine, joyful humanity to thrive. There are some brilliant, haunting stories—a gonzo sendup of corporate culture ("Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company" by Kevin Nguyen), a minithriller about a smart-home assistant with a mind of its own ("Warning Signs" by Emily J. Smith), a time-travel tale about the gentrification of the past ("Trojan Horses" by Jess Zimmerman), a too-close-to-home parable about aliens who arrive on Earth as refugees ("The Wretched and the Beautiful" by E. Lily Yu). There’s also some invigorating experimentation with form, including fiction in the form of operating instructions ("Hysteria" by Meg Elison), school paperwork ("Exemption Packet" by Rose Eveleth), text messages ("U Wont Remember Dying" by Russell Nichols), and a simple list ("An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried" by Debbie Urbanski). The dystopian realities of social media and late-stage capitalism are everywhere, with a ghost becoming a backdrop for selfies ("Ernest" by Geoff Manaugh), soldiers livestreaming from the front lines ("Headshot" by Julian Mortimer Smith), thousands of people lining up to toil meaninglessly in "entropy mills" ("Busy" by Omar El Akkad), and financial advisers pitching the zombie apocalypse as an investing opportunity ("Zombie Capitalism" by Tobias Buckell). Overall, this collection presents a sort of paranoid/defiant vision of the future in which everything and everyone is for sale but almost everything of value has been lost. Don’t look here for (much) hope, but do read these short, biting, vibrant stories for their wit, inventiveness, and verve.

These dark, witty, and occasionally mournful stories will thoroughly satisfy readers looking for creative new dystopias.

Kirkus Reviews