Real life starts in graduate school. Some mornings in West Lafayette, Patricia Westerford’s luck scares her. Forestry school: Purdue pays her to take classes she has craved for years.…

There were unexpected difficulties,” said the dark gray blur. That blur sat in a pale blue cushioned chair, no more than a meter away from where Ingray herself sat, facing, in an…

World building is the best part of writing,” Andy Weir tells me. The software engineer turned writer is getting his practice in. In his 2011 novel The Martian, he built a Mars base,…

The Omega Team was the soul of the company. Whereas the rest of the enterprise brought in the money to keep things going, by various commercial applications of narrow AI, the Omega…

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation,…

Science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson paints a vivid picture of life in New York City after the sea level rises more than 50 feet, drowning lower Manhattan and creating a forest…

Count to five, Noemi decides. If she’s cracking up—if the terror of the past few minutes has scrambled her mind to the point where she’s hallucinating—then this will all go…

Sydney Padua is an animator and cartoonist based in London. Her work has appeared in films such as The Iron Giant, Clash of the Titans, and John Carter. The Thrilling Adventures of…

What on earth was mine? Our underground domicile’s concrete walls mapped with veins of mold and ice, the drip-drip-drip of dirty melt from the ceiling into four rusty pots, the gray…

Lydia watched Ahad play the guitar. He leaned against a boulder, eyes shut, his face positioned to catch the last warm rays of the setting sun. His long, slender fingers caressed the…