Futures from Nature

Are aliens really not interested in us at all? Is there a significant health benefit from drinking your own urine? Is loading your personality into a computer the best way to survive the death of the body? Is the death of the body really necessary? Here are a very large number of very small fictions on the subject of the future and what it might be like. The authors include scientists, journalists, and many of the most famous SF writers in the world.

Futures from Nature includes everything from satires and vignettes to compressed stories and fictional book reviews, science articles, and journalism, in eight-hundred-word modules. All of them are entertaining and as a group they are a startling repository of ideas and attitudes about the future. These pieces were originally published in the great science journal Nature between 1999 and 2006, as one-page features that proved very popular with readers. This is a unique book, of interest to any reader who might like to speculate about the future.

Henry Gee was born in London in 1962. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Leeds, and his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge. In 1987 he joined the staff of Nature, the international science magazine. He is the author of The Science of Middle Earth, Jacob's Ladder, In Search of Deep Time and (with Luis V. Rey) A Field Guide to Dinosaurs. The Futures Science Fiction column in Nature, which he devised, garnered Nature the award of Best SF Publisher from the European Science Fiction Society. Henry Gee has recently moved to the seaside town of Cromer in Norfolk, where he lives with his wife, and two children.

Here are 100 very short stories on the subject of the future and what it might be like. The authors include scientists, journalists, and many of the most famous science fiction writers in the world. Futures from Nature includes everything from satires and vignettes to compressed stories and fictional book reviews, science articles, and journalism, in eight-hundred word modules. All of them are entertaining and as a group they are a startling repository of ideas and attitudes about the future.

Appearing in book form for the first time, these one hundred pieces were originally published in the great science journal, Nature, between 1999 and 2006, as one-page features. This is a unique book, by scientists and writers, of interest to any reader who might like to speculate about the future.

With stories from: Arthur C. Clarke; Bruce Sterling; Charles Stross; Cory Doctorow; Greg Bear; Gregory Benford; Oliver Morton; Ian MacLeod; Rudy Rucker; Greg Egan; Stephen Baxter; Barrington J. Bayley; Frederik Pohl; Vernor Vinge; Nancy Kress, Michael Moorcock, Vonda N. McIntyre; Kim Stanley Robinson; John M. Ford; and eighty more.

Are aliens really not interested in us at all? Is there a significant health benefit from drinking your own urine? Is loading your personality into a computer the best way to survive the death of the body? Is the death of the body really necessary? Here are a very large number of very small fictions on the subject of the future and what it might be like. The authors include scientists, journalists, and many of the most famous SF writers in the world.

Futures from Nature includes everything from satires and vignettes to compressed stories and fictional book reviews, science articles, and journalism, in eight-hundred-word modules. All of them are entertaining and as a group they are a startling repository of ideas and attitudes about the future. These pieces were originally published in the great science journal Nature between 1999 and 2006, as one-page features that proved very popular with readers. This is a unique book, of interest to any reader who might like to speculate about the future.

Henry Gee is a Senior Editor, Biological Sciences of Nature, and the author of The Science of Middle Earth; Jacobs Ladder: The History of the Human Genome, and In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life.