100 years in the future, 40-year-old Esther is the first of 47 sleepers to be ‘woken’ from cryogenic suspended animation in an underground bunker. Where are her children?
Mykaela Saunders’ Indigenous speculative fiction collection Always Will Be, published in the year following the failed referendum, is a very timely endeavour.
Married couple Woppa Diallo and Mame Bougouma Diene won for their powerful short story A Soul of Small Places.
An artist’s vision of a future underwater Lima, Peru, graces the cover of the short story collection ‘Llaqtamasi.’
Art by Juan Diego León via Pandemonium Editorial
In the Global South, a group of writers are rejecting the norms of science fiction and commenting on the future in a way that embraces Indigenous culture.
Exxon, 1972. That decade, the firm’s private research predicted that fossil use would heat the planet.
Dennis Brack / Alamy
In the shadow of the climate crisis, a wave of speculative stories ask what it means to live in a world where everything is not an extractable resource — and where humans are not in control.
Noongar author Claire Coleman’s new novel forces us to question what we value and how we live by combining dystopia and utopia, in a near-future very like our own.
Part historical novel, part speculative fiction, A History of Dreams examines the themes of inequality and authoritarianism from the perspective of a coven of witchy young women.
The work of imagining alternate futures is also about re-casting alternative pasts, as is done in the award-winning novel, ‘Washington Black’ by Esi Edugyan and adapted for the screen by podcast guest Selwyn Seyfu Hinds.
Washington Black/Random House
Speculative writers flesh out our passing thoughts into complete, functioning societies and explore how they might unfold.
Biologists are gathering evidence of green algae (pictured here in Kuwait) becoming carbohydrate-rich but less nutritious, due to increased carbon dioxide levels. As science fiction becomes science fact, new forms of storytelling are emerging.
Raed Qutena
In this vision of the future, everything that we currently do in the real world – going to school, going to work, socialising, leisure – is done in a vast virtual environment.