Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn

by Brian Merchant (Editor), Claire L. Evans (Editor)

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:	9780374602673
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/16/2022
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	25 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Brian Merchant is a journalist, producer, and author, whose focus is on technology, work, and the future. His first book, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone is published by Little, Brown. He's the co-founder of Terraform, VICE Media's speculative fiction project, and the author of the Blood in the Machine, also from Little, Brown. His work has appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, The Atlantic, Harper's, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, The Guardian, and beyond.


Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer of the GRAMMY-nominated pop group YACHT, a founding editor of Terraform, the former futures editor of Motherboard, and the author of Broad Band: The Untold story of the Women who Made the Internet. She is an advisor to design students at Art Center College of Design.

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is a founding editor of Terraform, the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to the Guardian, WIRED, and Aeon; previously, she was a contributor to Grantland and wrote National Geographic's popular culture and science blog, Universe. She is the author of Broad Band and co-editor of Terraform. Evans is an advisor to design students at Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

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

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

★ 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