Boing Boing pal Laura Hudson is helming a new project at The Verge called "Better Worlds," an anthology of ten science fiction stories written by diverse authors; half of them have been adapted as animations and the other half have been turned into audiobooks; all are explicitly optimistic, inspired by anthologies like Hieroglyph (which featured my award-winning novella The Man Who Sold the Moon).
Hudson has a great working definition of the kind of optimism she's after: "The stories of Better Worlds are not intended to be conflict-free utopias or Pollyanna-ish paeans about how tech will solve everything; many are set in societies where people face challenges, sometimes life-threatening ones. But all of them imagine worlds where technology has made life better and not worse, and characters find a throughline of hope."
The series launches January 14th.
Better Worlds is partly inspired by Stephenson’s fiction anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future as well as Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, a 2015 “visionary fiction” anthology that is written by a diverse array of social activists and edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. Their premise was simple: whenever we imagine a more equitable, sustainable, or humane world, we are producing speculative fiction, and this creates a “vital space” that is essential to forward progress.
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