Announcing Horizon 2045’s Far Futures project!

A couple of years ago, I was invited to a round table discussion hosted by the folks at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and an organization called N Square about nuclear weapons and denuclearization policy. I’ve written about the school’s efforts to tie science fiction and science and policy together, and have an academic background in military warfare, so it was a neat opportunity. The goal of the meeting was do devise some boundaries for a potential project about what a world without nuclear weapons would look like: how would their elimination impact international relations, domestic policy, and so forth.

A while after the event, the folks behind the initiative got in touch and asked if I’d be interested in writing a story for the project’s next phase: a series of stories that imagined that nuclear weapons-free world, with an idea of imagining what that optimistic future might look like. I keep a notebook that I’ve been jotting down story/character/world ideas in, and I had an idea that might work: a historian who was brought into the site of a space battle with the idea of backtracking the sequence of events to find and assign responsibility in the event that someone might run into a warhead down the line. The idea came a bit from my work with military history, but also the anti-landmine work that Senator Patrick Leahy (who represented Vermont) had done over the years.

In chatting with the project leaders, I realized that this idea would work with some modifications, and I ended up writing a version that incorporated some of the ideas. (Maybe I’ll go back to the original idea at some point…) They accepted it a while ago, and after some back and forth with edits, it’s ready for publication when the project launches on May 29th!

The project will officially launch on the 29th at 12PM eastern time on Zoom (you can register here) with a panel discussion from some of the contributors, and there’ll be an in-person talk with Horizon 2045’s Editorial Director Jenny Johnson at 10PM at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District. It’ll be live-streamed, and you can get tickets here.

I’m particularly excited to see what the other contributors have written: the project will feature stories by Madeline Ashby, Vincent Ialenti, PAGES Matam, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Annalee Newitz, Malka Older, Tochi Onyebuchi, João Queiroz, Sheree Renėe Thomas, and Peter Waring. It’s a really fantastic group of people, and I feel privileged to be part of the group.

I hope that you'll read it, and the other stories in the project when it comes out. I'll send out an update when that happens!