Tales from a far out future! Read three science fiction tales set in space. Daring escapes, investigations and pursuits! Featuring Caspian Porter, The Investigator, and Gritt Grimstone. Enjoy black and white sci-fi adventures from SnowyWorks.

Collection of five hard science fiction novellas, all set at least ten thousand years in the future that confront the issues of cosmology, astronomy, evolution, and biology.

Welcome to the world of Gritt Grimstone, a seasoned pilot, a dedicated astronaut, a daring adventurer and a master of all trades. In this book, an aging Gritt Grimstone attends his 104th birthday party on a space station orbiting Earth. While at the party he recounts several tales from his life to a young child. These are the Tales From a Far Out Future! In this book we encounter 4 short stories + the narration!

Finalist, 2019 Locus Award for Nonfiction, presented by the Locus Science Fiction Foundation Traverses the history of imagined futures from the 1890s to the 2010s, interweaving speculative visions of gender, race, and sexuality from literature, film, and digital media Old Futures explores the social, political, and cultural forces feminists, queer people, and people of color invoke when they dream up alternative futures as a way to imagine transforming the present. Lothian shows how queer possibilities emerge when we practice the art of speculation: of imagining things otherwise than they are and creating stories from that impulse. Queer theory offers creative ways to think about time, breaking with straight and narrow paths toward the future laid out for the reproductive family, the law-abiding citizen, and the believer in markets. Yet so far it has rarely considered the possibility that, instead of a queer present reshaping the ways we relate to past and future, the futures imagined in the past can lead us to queer the present. Narratives of possible futures provide frameworks through which we understand our present, but the discourse of “the” future has never been a singular one. Imagined futures have often been central to the creation and maintenance of imperial domination and technological modernity; Old Futures offers a counterhistory of works that have sought—with varying degrees of success—to speculate otherwise. Examining speculative texts from the 1890s to the 2010s, from Samuel R. Delany to Sense8, Lothian considers the ways in which early feminist utopias and dystopias, Afrofuturist fiction, and queer science fiction media have insisted that the future can and must deviate from dominant narratives of global annihilation or highly restrictive hopes for redemption. Each chapter chronicles some of the means by which the production and destruction of futures both real and imagined takes place: through eugenics, utopia, empire, fascism, dystopia, race, capitalism, femininity, masculinity, and many kinds of queerness, reproduction, and sex. Gathering stories of and by populations who have been marked as futureless or left out by dominant imaginaries, Lothian offers new insights into what we can learn from efforts to imaginatively redistribute the future.

The early days of space travel - the tragic deaths, the explorers who disappeared without a trace, the many heroisms- were now relegated to a few pages in history textbooks.

In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come. Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction. As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

Here are 25 stories of science fiction that push the envelope, by the biggest names in an emerging new crop of high-tech futuristic SF - including Charles Stross, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton and Neal Asher. High-tech SF has made a significant comeback in the last decade, as bestselling authors successfully blend the super-science of 'hard science fiction' with real characters in an understandable scenario. It is perhaps a reflection of how technologically controlled our world is that readers increasingly look for science fiction that considers the fates of mankind as a result of increasing scientific domination. This anthology brings together the most extreme examples of the new high-tech, far-future science fiction, pushing the limits way beyond normal boundaries. The stories include: "A Perpetual War Fought Within a Cosmic String", "A Weapon That Could Destroy the Universe", "A Machine That Detects Alternate Worlds and Creates a Choice of Christs", "An Immortal Dead Man Sent To The End of the Universe", "Murder in Virtual Reality", "A Spaceship So Large That There is An Entire Planetary System Within It", and "An Analytical Engine At The End of Time", and "Encountering the Untouchable."

This book argues that, as industrial capitalism enters a period of prolonged crisis, a new paradigm of ‘industrious modernity’ is emerging. Based on small-scale, commons-based and market-oriented entrepreneurship, this industrious modernity is being pioneered by the many outcasts that no longer find a place within a crumbling industrial modernity. This new industriousness draws on the new planetary commons that have been generated by the globalization of industrial capitalism itself. The outsourcing of material production to global supply chains has made the skills necessary to engage in commodity production generic and common, and the globalization of media culture and the internet have generated new knowledge commons. Together these new commons have radically reduced the capital requirements to engage in economic activity, and are providing new, highly efficient tools of productive organization at little cost. This timely analysis of the new forces of change in our societies today will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the impact of digital technologies and the future of capitalism.

After explicating the analytical framework I will proceed to develop scenarios as follows: I. General scenarios -maladaptive and adaptive. 2. The future for the Western group of societies. Within this will seek to identify the main changes in the natures of work, leisure, family organisation, education and life styles. 3. The future for the major Asian powers, China, Japan and India. 4. A world scenario centred about the first two scenarios but also aimed to locate within this pattern the most probable future for sets of the smaller societies and under-developed countries. The scenarios will be developed in that order, for good reasons. Sociological forecasting has to deal, in the first instance, with sets of societies that are closely interdependent, each with the other. A scenario for Western societies generally is required before one can hope to write one for the individual countries, e.g. France, Australia, because they are not evolving independently. The widespread upsurge of student revolts in 1967-68 well illustrates this interdependence. Some writers, like Stevens (1970) have taken the U.S.A. as the model of the future for the other smaller Western societies. There is some justifi cation for this as the U.S. has certainly been the 'leading part' in the West for some decades. However, there is danger in assuming that that will persist. A change in the near future in the problems that commonly confront Western societies may make the U.S. example 'depasee', old hat, if not down-right misleading.

Learn how to get started with Futures Thinking. With this practical guide, Phil Balagtas, founder of the Design Futures Initiative and the global Speculative Futures network, shows you how designers and futurists have made futures work at companies such as Atari, IBM, Apple, Disney, Autodesk, Lufthansa, and McKinsey & Company. This book demystifies the process of Futures Thinking into a language that's practical and useful for both designers and strategists. You'll learn about Strategic Foresight for using ideas about the future to anticipate and prepare for change; explore Speculative Design to deal with the relationship between science, technology, and humans; and Design Fiction to explore and critique possible futures. Balagtas also shares stories from his journey to build a global community and describes how he works with clients to reshape the futures vocabulary. With this guide, you'll learn how to: Prepare your client, team, and/or audience for futures Facilitate and work with the fundamental methods and frameworks Gain advocacy and support within your organization Provide measurable value from the process and outcomes Build a futures culture and team Sustain a culture and support system beyond projects