By Gunnar Anderson
A story about dimensional paradoxes, consumerism, and crime.
Future Tense is a partnership of New America and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy and society.
Future Tense is the citizen’s guide to the future.
The partnership provides insightful, timely, and unexpected analysis at the intersection of technology and society through written commentary, original fiction, and live events in Washington, D.C. and beyond.
Upcoming & Recent Events
Searching for Hopeful Climate Futures in the Present
Where can we look for hopeful climate futures, when the global picture seems dominated by inaction or backsliding? While influential nations and international bodies seem adrift, absent, or flatfooted in the face of an accelerating climate emergency, vigorous action is happening at local and regional levels, propelled by coalitions of advocates, researchers, community leaders, and everyday people. In this conversation on the new book Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, we will talk with writers and thinkers from different regions to learn not only about hopeful climate stories and imaginaries but also local resources and efforts on the ground.
What Is Fiction’s Role in Imagining Better Social Policies?
Science fiction often concerns itself with grand technological systems and nifty innovations in future worlds far from our own. But the genre can be a full-service “laboratory of the mind,” as useful for imagining alternate social, political, and community structures as for new gadgets. In this conversation, editors of the anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope will join sociologists and futurists to consider the role of social science in science fiction and how researchers, advocates, and policymakers can use fiction to design futures they want to work toward.
Future Tense Fiction
A series of original science fiction stories crafted by leading authors, exploring how science and technology will change our lives in the future. Each story is paired with a response essay by an expert in a related field.
By Samit Basu
A story about celebrity, surveillance, and political repression in a future Mumbai.
By Gabriela Damián Miravete
A story about fast fashion, labor organizing, automation, and solidarity.
Best of Future Tense
Future Tense publishes commentary by researchers and scholars at Arizona State University, alongside many other writers and thinkers from the fields of journalism, public policy, science and technology, and more.
