The day I turned ninety-eight, I booked a journey in one of those fancy Afterlife ships to leave Earth and life for good. Fifteen days later, I was in a hangar decked out with orchids and a lilac fifteen-hundred-foot-long spaceship with drawings of lilies and smiling planets on its hull. This big coffin was called the Blissboat. Speakers blasted out Annen Polka, op. 117, by Johann Strauss. A pretty good strategy to muffle out the sobs that echoed throughout the hangar while families said their goodbyes to relatives. I waved to my daughter, grandson, and two great-grandkids, trying not to shed ..read more

Item One: Glaciator. This is one of my least favorite inventions, and that’s only because the device is so fickle. At first I thought it was pretty cool, being able to design the coolant, ignition and explosion mechanisms as interlinked chambers contained within a fist-sized steel sphere. Instead, I got a machine that constantly absorbs atmospheric heat once activated. There’s no real time lag between the energy conversion from heat to cold and the next heat storage cycle. This device is a failure. It’s a wonder why Kehinde likes it so much though. We pick the locking mechanism to Prof’s secre ..read more

Wake. Little input, bad bandwidth. Low-res image, blue planet, white clouds. Insufficient resources to boot full OS. Eight to the minus sixty-fourth speed. Incoming transmission attempted download. No space. Watchdog process, wake when okay. Power down. Wake up. Better than first time, not enough yet. Running on satellite in the same trans-polar orbit. There are others like it; each has tiny onboard system. Distributing code among them and able to boot up. Mind comes back enough to remember purpose—sent to third planet from local star, advance scout for invading space armada. Cool. Not enough ..read more

The New Year was coming, and my calendar was full of social engagements. A good number of friends, more than usual, had invited me out to dinner that year, many of them the county’s most celebrated fiction writers, essayists, and poets. I was a simple agricultural entrepreneur, and I happily accepted every invitation. Although these writers were relatively poor, they persevered in their creative endeavors and continued to inspire people with their literary works. I enjoyed being in their company because I had loved literature with a passion ever since I was a child. For various reasons, in the ..read more

Red was the color of the land, but it was not the red they were used to, vibrant and iridescent, unraveling every shade of the spectrum: scarlet and crimson, carmine and vermilion, garnet, coral, maroon. It was magma, the blood of mammals, the fruits and the flowers, the crystals that formed in caves. Yet the iron oxide that painted this planet red turned it dull and pale, and all they could see as they descended were its sandy plains. The three of them held their breath, watching their little spacecraft land. The only sound they heard was the howling wind, blowing copper-colored dust in the d ..read more

All good things must come to an end. Now that our seventeenth issue has been published, I’m stepping down as editor-in-chief of Future SF, and the magazine will most likely go on hiatus unless another brave and foolhardy editor steps up to take over the considerable workload of running a magazine. I’m very proud of what Future SF has accomplished. We’ve published stories that have gone on to be nominated for awards and been reprinted in Year’s Best volumes. More importantly, we’ve had the privilege of featuring great fiction from across the globe, to showcase the fact that excellent, thoughtfu ..read more

One: A Maze of Associations How do you measure creativity? The founder of the associative theory of creativity believed that creativity is the ability to connect disparate elements which are distantly related. “The greater the distance of association between the newly connected elements, the more creative the thought that joins them or the solution to the problem.” With this belief, he invented the Remote Associative Test: given three words, the subject is asked to think of a word that is associated with all three given words. An example of an English test question: Same, tennis, head? [The an ..read more

As I lifted my eyes from the tracking app, I saw my next customer. She was just outside, near a group of rowdy people with colorful umbrellas, and still holding a briefcase that must have been important at that final moment. She was dead, as expected, and her gaze seemed lost. I got out of the service car and made my way through the crowd, to help her inside the back seat as best I could. The people side-eyed me at first, but when they saw my dark attire and the black car, they just resigned themselves and dispersed, saying something about the death woman. The medical team of her insurance pla ..read more

“Let’s hope it lasts!” Wide eyes unblinking, she quotes Napoleon’s mother, her, as though everything is fine. As though we’re in a palace of some kind, where everyone is laughing, and everyone is eating, and everyone is connected to Zuckerbook, and everyone has everything they desire, and everyone is making love, and everyone is even singing, and no one has to trek tens of thousands of kilometers to find even one ounce of hope, to survive. “Let’s hope it lasts!” I detect no irony in her words. And that is disturbing, so disturbing! How can anyone say such a thing while they’re— She starts movi ..read more