After six years of So Fi Zine and five years of Fiction @ The Sociological Review, I’m stoked to share my first anthology project: Bits/Bytes/Dreams, a collection of sociological fiction on tomorrow’s technologies. The anthology is free to read online here, and I recommend a ‘booklet’ print for the held-paper reading experience.
Bits/Bytes/Dreams explores the material and social ways that data manifest, how innovations are imagined and realised, what people hope for and what they fear about technological change. I selected these 14 stories from the ~300 strong archive of creative works I have edited and published over the last few years, for the ways they bring a conceptual and literary sensitivity to the promise and problem of social/technological development. Their themes and subjects are ones I’ve been immersed in through my work with ADM+S; these stories have advanced my own thinking and I hope their clear-sighted considerations of sociotechnical nuances expand your own understandings too. I am so thankful to all of the authors for their enthusiasm for this collection.
Launch event: next Tuesday (June 27), one of the featured authors Allan McCay and I will be in-conversation to mark the launch of this anthology. This is a free public online event, running as part of my Artificial Artificial Intelligence series. Please do join us as we talk over the pleasures and horrors of speculative designs and pop culture imaginaries.
Bits/Bytes/Dreams contents:
Stealth Love, Massimo Airoldi
Trouble with Technology/Lightening the Load?, Gemma Hughes
2343 – A Day in the Life of a Citizen of Cassini, John-Paul Smiley
I’m Always There, Murray Goulden and Jamie Woodcock
Future(s) of Technology-Enabled Care, Rachel Creaney
Five Minutes to Daybreak, Lauren Alessi
Vulcan, Allan McCay
Dark Templates, Anne Turner
Smiling Gives You Wrinkles, Anoushka Benbow
Rebecca, Rob White
In Her Eyes, Hillary Steinberg
Big Farmer, Catie Gressier and Lauri Turner