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.