Sarah Schofield

Eliana Davis, a military brat, must move in the middle of her sophomore year to the small Oregon town where her parents grew up.

Solo

Sara Maitland

Simon Ings

Toby Litt

Gregory Norminton

Sean O'Brien

Justina Robson

Jane Rogers

Jane Feaver

Adam Marek

Dilys Rose

K.J. Orr

Annie Kirby

Simon van Booy

Programmable memories, fatherless reproduction, nano-tech implants, amphibian-powered scar treatment, full body modification, brain-scanning lie-detectors, inter-species reproduction, self-determining synthetic ‘green goo’… Which of these would you wager is pure science fiction, and which currently being developed in the lab? Such is the speed and excitement of today’s bio-medical research – sprinting from the starting gun that was the Human Genome Project – it’s sometimes hard to tell. In a unique collaboration, fourteen short story writers have been invited to explore the increasingly grey area between the fantastical and that which is already within our reach. Closely collaborating with scientists and ethicists working at the forefronts of their respective fields, each writer has been tasked with predicting some of the potential ‘ethical side-effects’ of this ground-breaking work. Not all progress, after all, is progressive. And dark forces are afoot that threaten to hi-jack what many declared would be ‘the century of biology’. 'Fascinating reading.' - Financial Times 'An exhilarating read.' - The Short Review Toby Litt's Bio-Punk story 'Call it ''The Bug'' Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title' short-listed for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

Bio-Punk

Adam Roberts

Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Lucy Caldwell

Julian Gough

Claire Dean

Stuart Evers

Robin Yassin-Kassab

Martyn Bedford

Margaret Wilkinson

Zoe Lambert

Joanna Quinn

Andy Hedgecock

Dinesh Allirajah

Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will diverge and disperse into a balanced ecosystem of humans and ‘robjects’ (robotic objects). Somewhere in between, we humans will have to change also… in the way we interact with technology, the roles we adopt in an increasingly ‘intelligent’ environment, and how we interface with each other. The driving motors behind many of these changes will be artificial life (A-Life) and unconventional computing. How exactly they will impact on our world is still an open question. But in the spirit of collective intelligence, this anthology brings together 38 scientists and authors, working in pairs, to imagine what life (and A-Life) will look like in the year 2070. Every kind of technology is imagined: from lie-detection glasses to military swarmbots, brain-interfacing implants to synthetically ‘grown’ skyscrapers, revolution-inciting computer games to synthetically engineered haute cuisine. All artificial life is here. Featuring scientific contributions from: Martyn Amos, J. Mark Bishop, Seth Bullock, Stephen Dunne, James Dyke, Christian Jantzen, Francesco Mondada, James D. O'Shea, Andrew Philippides, Lenka Pitonakova, Steen Rasmussen, Thomas S. Ray, Micah Rosenkind, James Snowdon, Susan Stepney, Germán Terrazas, Andrew Vardy and Alan Winfield. Supported by TRUCE (Training and Research in Unconventional Computation in Europe).

Stories From an A-Life Future

Beta-Life

Sophie Westacott had it all, a celebrity boyfriend, an inner-city Sydney terrace, a great job at a top-tier law firm, and invitations to A-list events within the tight clique of Sydney's Beautiful People. But it all slips away when her boyfriend, Connor Bayles, Channel 8's newsreader, breaks up with her, leaving Sophie to wonder how she ever thought they were the perfect couple. After eight years of being out of Sydney's dating scene and faced with a barrage of websites, events, and apps, she wonders how she'll ever find someone. A visit to her grandmother on the family farm in southern Tasmania, reveals a long-held family secret, one that will help focus her search. Sophie comes to believe the man of her dreams is born on the 11th of April, and with the help of her friends, she jumps onto a roller coaster ride of parties and dates trying to find him. A funny and heart-breaking adventure of what one woman will do to find the right man!

Right Date Wrong Guy

Zoe Gilbert

Robin Ince

Ian Watson

Anneliese Mackintosh

Sandra Alland

Annie Clarkson

Marie Louise Cookson

Featuring leading scientists acting as consultants on the stories, and writing scientific afterwords, bringing the theory featured in the stories to life, including Prof. Sarah Bridle (Jodrell Bank), Prof. Jonathan Wolff and Prof. Frank Jackson (the inventor of the 'Mary's Room' thought experiment). Science is always telling stories. Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative – just as much as metaphor – is a key tool in the scientist’s surprisingly literary toolkit. Perhaps the most interesting use of story is the thought experiment, the intuition pump, that draws on the most instinctive parts of the imagination to crack otherwise perplexing problems. From Newton's Bucket, to Maxwell’s Demon, from Einstein's Lift to Schrödinger’s Cat – all are examples of 'fiction' being used at the highest level, not just to explain, but to deduce, to prove. In this unique anthology, authors have collaborated with leading scientists, to bounce literary, human narratives against purely theoretical ones, alloying together real stories with abstract ones, to produce truly extraordinary results. Full list of thought experiments: The Twin Paradox, The Grandfather Paradox, Maxwell's Demon, Laplace's Demon, Mary's Room, The Chinese Room, Schrödinger's Cat, Galileo's Boat, The Infinite Monkey Typing Pool, Einstein in a LIft, Einstein Chasing a Beam of Light, Newton's Bucket, Olber's Paradox.

Fictions and Hypotheticals

Thought X

Frank Cottrell Boyce

Brian Aldiss

Wojciech Orlinski

Jacek Dukaj

Trevor Hoyle

Piotr Szulkin

We know Stanislaw Lem, whether or not we consciously know that we do. He may only be recognised in the West as the author of the twice-filmed novel, Solaris, but the influence of his other work is legion. From computer games (The Sims was inspired by one of his short stories), to films (the red and blue pills of The Matrix owe much to his Futurological Congress); from the space comedies of Red Dwarf to the metaphysical satires of Douglas Adams... the presence of this masterly Polish writer can be traced far and wide. Nor was his genius confined to fiction. Lem's essays and pseudo-essays borne out of the military industrial tensions of the Cold War have outlived their original context and speak to the most current developments in virtual reality, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. To celebrate his name, as well as his vision, this anthology brings together writers, critics and scientists who continue to grapple with his concerns. British and Polish novelists join screenwriters, poets, computer engineers, and artists, to celebrate and explore Lem's legacy through short stories and essays - two literary forms that, as Lem knew well, can blend together to create something altogether new. As one of the barriers to Lem's fame was language, this book also features specially commissioned translations: three stories never to have appeared in English before. Lem was always ahead of us. It's time we caught up.

Lemistry

A woman grows increasingly frustrated by the emails she receives from her deceased husband… A taxidermist dreams of bringing one of his clients into his workshop after preserving her grandfather’s hamster… A grieving nurse is troubled by her daughter’s fascination with The Iron Lady… In her stirring and disquieting debut collection of stories, Sarah Schofield explores emotions that seethe beneath the surface of ourselves and live in the spaces that language can’t reach, elevating manifestations of loneliness, grief and disconnection into direct sight. The characters we meet in Safely Gathered In harness objects around them, both manmade and of the natural world, to deal with secrets and loss; from the child acting out a family betrayal from the comfort of her dolls house, to the sister making wind-up toys from the dead birds she finds on her doorstep. Venturing into the surreal and experimenting with tropes of science-fiction, these stories consider the effects of consumerism on our most intimate moments, grasp into the depths of nostalgia, and cast a fresh light into the gaps we navigate each day between reality and longing. "This is a deliciously wry Black Mirror-esque collection that provokes and disturbs. A bold and brilliant debut." – Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Water Shall Refuse Them "Schofield's collection comprises finely inventive stories, astute in their side angle swipes on reality. A memorable and distinctive debut." – Kiare Ladner, author of Nightshift "Sarah Schofield is a writer with tremendous rage and inventiveness, who takes the short story to new places" – Naomi Booth, author of Exit Management "Sharp, insightful and haunting, these stories are not safe reading. An astounding debut." – Angela Readman, author of Something Like Breathing "An enchanting, vital collection. Strange, incisive and compelling." – Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch

Safely Gathered In

Paul Theroux

Mark Haddon

Saleem Haddad

Margaret Drabble

Ramsey Campbell

Lara Williams

David Constantine

Alan Beard

Gerard Woodward

Gaia Holmes

Bernardine Bishop

Christine Poulson

Matthew Holness

Lucie McKnight Hardy

Mike Nelson

Meave Haughey

Karen Featherstone

SOMETHING HAS FALLEN AWAY. We have lost a part of ourselves, our history, what we once were. That something, when we encounter it again, look it straight in the eyes, disgusts us, makes us retch. This is the horror of the abject. Following the success of Comma’s award-winning New Uncanny anthology, The New Abject invites leading authors to respond to two parallel theories of the abject – Julia Kristeva’s theory of the psychoanalytic, intimate abject, and Georges Bataille’s societal equivalent – with visceral stories of modern unease. As we become ever-more isolated by social media bubbles, or the demands for social distancing, our moral gag-reflex is increasingly sensitised, and our ability to tolerate difference, or ‘the other’, atrophies. Like all good horror writing, these stories remind us that exposure to what unsettles us, even in small doses, is always better than pretending it doesn’t exist. After all, we can never be wholly free of that which belongs to us.

Tales of Modern Unease

The New Abject

Kamila Shamsie

Giles Foden

Grazyna Plebanek

Jan Krasnowolski

Dr Richard Niland

Farah Ahamed

Prof Robert Hampson

Agnieszka Dale

SJ Bradley 

A merchant sailor works for a decade, captaining a yacht up and down the coasts of Malaysia, in the hope that his crooked employer will stay true to a promise... Years after a pandemic sweeps across Europe, wiping out its all-white population, a pilgrim returns to his Polish birthplace in search of the only other non-white kid he knew at school... An inscrutable hotelier loses his composure when a secret passage is discovered in his hotel, leading to a mysterious room and a previously hidden existence... Born in what is now Ukraine to Polish parents, naturalised as a British citizen, and schooled on the high seas of international commerce, Joseph Conrad was a true citizen of the world. His novels bore witness to the dehumanising repercussions of empire, explored a world in which state-sponsored terrorism ruined individuals' lives, and pioneered complex narrative structures and subjective points-of-view in what was to become the first wave of literary modernism. To mark his 160th birthday, 14 authors and critics from Britain, Poland and elsewhere have come together to celebrate his legacy with new pieces of fiction and non-fiction. Conrad felt that the writer's task was to offer 'that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.' In an age of increasing isolationism, these celebrations remind you of the value of such glimpses.

A celebration of the work of Joseph Conrad

Conradology

Sarah Schofield

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