Claire Dean

Aya Kato

When Polly Greene's older sister Bree runs away from home, Polly and her eccentric grandmother believe she is hiding in the neighboring Idaho woods, and when they discover a mysterious, hidden grove of larches, Polly and her friends build a shelter for Bree and try to save the grove from developers. 25,000 first printing.

Girlwood

Adam Roberts

Hannu Rajaniemi

Jeff Noon

Stuart Clark

M. John Harrison

Kathleen Ann Goonan

Tad Williams

Michael Doser

Adrian Ellis

We're running out of planet and we're running out of patience. The party's over and we're looking for the door. But the exits are unmarked. The engines of the world are hidden from us. Ninety-six per cent of the universe is missing and the rest is stirred into motion by machinery that hides in plain sight. We've got to get out of this place - but how? Embracing everything from politics to polymorphism, physics & fantasy, Exit Strategies is your indispensable, (sometimes unreliable) guide to the escape tunnel. With a foreword by CERN physicist Michael Doser, and featuring stories by Jeff Noon, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and the best-selling fantasy writer Tad Williams, Exit Strategies looks for a back door to the universe over 150 pages. How much of the cosmos is real, how much an astronomer's dream? And if we could escape from reality, what kind of utopia would we build for ourselves? Elsewhere in Exit Strategies, M. John Harrison meets a rising star of TV science, Hannu Rajaniemi considers what will happen when our books start reading us, and Claire Dean meets the artists bent on making J G Ballard's Crystal World a reality. And in a special tribute, Adam Roberts considers the life, work and sheer sanity of the late, great Iain Banks. Every two months Arc maps the future through stories, features, essays and provocations from some of the world's most celebrated authors from science fiction and beyond.

Exit strategies

Arc 2.1

Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Sarah Schofield

Toby Litt

Lucy Caldwell

Julian Gough

Sean O'Brien

Stuart Evers

Robin Yassin-Kassab

Martyn Bedford

Margaret Wilkinson

Zoe Lambert

Adam Marek

Joanna Quinn

Andy Hedgecock

K.J. Orr

Annie Kirby

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

The Unwish

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

Claire Dean

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