MIT's Twelve Tomorrows anthology is now definitely out! "Inspired by the real-life breakthroughs covered in the pages of MIT Technology Review, writers Nick Harkaway, Bruce Sterling, and Paola Antonelli join emerging authors from around the world to envision the future of the Internet, biotechnology, computing, and more."
Earlier: my acknowledgements to go with my story.
See also: I've only read one story so far, Charles Stross's "Life's A Game," which makes an excellent addition to this gamification fiction listicle.
Elsewhere: review in Locus.
Idk why they didn't just call it Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow I would have called it that.
"Two thoosand an' fifteen?! Ye mean we're in the future?"
- "Aye! ...A 'hink." pic.twitter.com/JeY3G3AC0u
— Back Tae The Future (@BackTaeTheToon) June 17, 2015
OK but, gentlemen: I think three out of eleven contributors are women. The one before I think was two out of nine. The one before was a bit better. I recognize that sometimes, as an editor or organizer, you make a decision to seek some certain kind of variety or dialogism -- perhaps a kind that doesn't register very visibly in the quasi-canonical set of authorial identity characteristics around which the contemporary new left is organized -- and that variety or dialogism offsets and explains, even if it doesn't excuse, the plethora of white men. And I'm not somebody who thinks gender parity necessarily needs to exist within every year of a multi-year literary project. That said, I have no doubt that such a smart project as Twelve Tomorrows, so invested with the idea of being cutting-edge, already realizes it is veering toward unacceptable, and is going to spend some energies next time round to correct its course. Right guys? Yeah! I guess I should be grateful that Bruce Sterling was so dauntlessly perigrinatory and so devil-may-care supportive of work by relatively unknown or not-known-for-sf writers, which is why my story's in it. But personally, if I'd been editing this year, why not just completely cut the stories by Ned, Nick, John, Pepe, Charlie, Daniel, Virgil and DEFINITELY Bruce, and actually possibly Annalee, Paolo and Ilona tbh. Sometimes less is more, you get me.
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