As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr probably never said, ‘predictions are hard, especially about the future.’ And although the job of authors of science fiction and speculative fiction isn’t to make accurate predictions about what our future lives might look like, but to entertain us by tapping into current concerns, […]
‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ is a short story by the British-born science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008). It was first published in the 1953 anthology Star Science Fiction Stories #1, before being collected in Clarke’s The Other Side of the Sky. A short tale about religion, computers, […]
‘The Fog Horn’ is a 1951 short story by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), republished in 1953 as the opening story in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. The story, which is about a lighthouse whose foghorn emits a noise which attracts the attention of a primeval dinosaur living miles […]
‘Johnny Mnemonic’ is a 1981 short story by the Canadian-American author and cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson. Although many people, when they hear the name ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, will probably think of the 1995 film starring Keanu Reeves, Gibson’s story is somewhat different from the film which it inspired, and so some […]
‘The Pedestrian’ is a 1951 short story by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), which is included in his 1953 collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. In some ways a precursor to Bradbury’s more famous novel Fahrenheit 451, ‘The Pedestrian’ is set in a future world in which people sit mindlessly and […]