TRSF

Featuring all-new stories by a dozen of the most visionary science fiction authors writing today, TRSF takes us to 12 possible worlds of tomorrow. Inspired by the real-life breakthroughs covered by MIT's Technology Review, celebrated writers join the freshest talent from around the world to describe what the future may have in store for the Internet, biotechnology, energy, computing, and more.

Illustrated with an original cover painting by legendary sci-fi illustrator Chris Foss, the TRSF also features classic Foss covers inside its pages.

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INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the 2011 TRSF, the first annual anthology of original science fiction stories from MIT’s Technology Review. With stories set in the near future from celebrated masters and emerging authors, TRSF is our contribution to the tradition of “hard” science fiction. It’s a tradition that stretches all the way back to Jules Verne, in which writers draw from the cutting edges of engineering and science, and try to portray how technology might advance in a way that futurists, economists, and other down-to-earth pundits can’t.

Because of its emphasis on technical plausibility, hard science fiction has been accused in the past—not always unfairly—of neglecting plot and character development in favor of breathless exposition about some flashy gadget or astronomical phenomenon. But the stories in these pages prove that you don’t have to sacrifice great writing to say something interesting about how the future might work. Hard science fiction has also been accused—again, not always unfairly—of being the jealously guarded preserve of mostly American men. So, striving for a richer spectrum of viewpoints, we have chosen male and female authors who come from around the world, including one writer whose work is appearing for the first time in English.

Inspired by the real-world technological breakthroughs covered online and in print by Technology Review, these authors bring you 12 visions of tomorrow, looking at how the Internet, computing, energy, biotechnology, spaceflight, and more might develop, and how those developments might affect the people who have to live with them. What do you think of these visions? What technologies do you believe are going to profoundly transform how we live, and would deserve to be the inspiration for a story in next year’s TRSF?

-- Stephen Cass, Editor