ABOUT FAR FUTURES

Tens of thousands of people are working to address the thicket of existential threats facing our societies and our planet in pursuit of a more just, sustainable, and secure world. But we’re so engrossed in the details, complexities, and interdependencies of tackling these threats—all the details of what must be accomplished and on what timeline—that problems and challenges fill our whole viewshed. The better place we’re trying to get to—a future beyond these threats—stands tiny, hazy, and uncontoured in the distance. We know what we’re trying to move our world away from, but what exactly are we moving it toward?

What we’re missing is a vision.

This is particularly true in the nuclear threat space. In our efforts to compel a world that no longer relies on nuclear weapons for global security, we have not yet collectively and fully imagined what that world might actually look like. By eradicating the nuclear threat, what will we have unleashed and enabled? What becomes possible when nuclear weapons have been removed from the human story? In a world in which a durable nuclear weapons prohibition has been achieved, what might be different, and what are the dividends?

It’s not just the people working on these threats who need to know. While overwhelming majorities of the public desire a world without nuclear weapons, most people don’t believe it is possible. The key reason, new research by the Nuclear Threat Initiative suggests, is the near complete absence of positive stories, in any medium, about a future that does not feature nuclear weapons. When NTI’s study participants were shown test media that included a positive vision of the future, something interesting happened—they were persuaded to shift their views on the urgency and achievability of nuclear disarmament.

We need a clearer depiction of how much brighter our future will be when nuclear weapons no longer hold the world hostage and global security has been deeply reimagined. We need a picture of what that world would look like so we can ask ourselves what steps we must take to create it. How do we describe, and bring alive, a future on the other side of nuclear weapons? And what if that future only becomes possible because we developed a vision of what it might look like—the big “so what” to all of our efforts?

Created by Horizon 2045 in collaboration with Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, Far Futures invites science fiction authors, visual artists, musicians, and other creatives to explore a future in which we successfully manage our way through a combination of natural and anthropogenic threats—with a durable nuclear weapons prohibition as a cornerstone of that future. To launch the project, we invited a set of accomplished contributors to create technically grounded, inspiring visions of a future shaped by the decision to eliminate nuclear weapons and by the mechanics of achieving and maintaining a nuclear prohibition. We want to play out the assumption that by ridding ourselves of existential threat, we will have opened up new possibilities that create a better future.

CONTRIBUTORS
Meet the Far Futurists
Sheree Renée Thomas
Sheree Renée Thomas

Sheree Renée Thomas (she/her) is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and Hugo Award nominated, three-time World Fantasy Award-winning editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and Mississippi Delta conjure. She is the author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories From an Ancient Future (2020) and two multigenre/hybrid collections, Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (2016) and Shotgun Lullabies (2011). Her writing has earned her fiction fellowships at the Millay Colony of the Arts, Bread Loaf Environmental, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, and Smith College, and poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts and the Cave Canem Foundation, among others. Sheree is co-editor of Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction and Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue, and editor of the groundbreaking Dark Matter anthologies that first introduced W.E.B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction and explored 160+ years of Black speculative fiction. She is editor of The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction and associate editor of Obsidian. Her collaboration with artist Janelle Monáe on the “Timebox Altar(ed)” novelet appears in The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer, a New York Times bestseller. Sheree wrote the Marvel novel adaptation of the legendary comic Black Panther: Panther’s Rage (2022). Her comic book debut, “The World Is Not Ready,” featuring Black Panther and Storm, appears in Marvel Voices: Legends #1 (January 31, 2024). She lives in Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid. Visit shereereneethomas.com.

Peter Waring
Peter Waring

Peter Waring (he/him) is a research consultant for the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and the co-host and co-creator of the multi-award winning Audible Original podcast, Deepest Dive: The Search for MH370. As a core contributor to Horizon 2045, Peter explored the future of nuclear policy, global governance, and the Anthropocene and co-authored The Seven Shifts, a set of stories about how humanity could move through the tumult of the present to get to a better future. He has also managed nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament projects for Ridgeway Information, a London-based research consultancy. Previously, he spent 11 years in the Australian Navy, during which he led a science mission to Antarctica, served as part of the search team for missing Malaysian jetliner MH370, and deployed to the Middle East as the personal aide to Australia’s regional commander.

Vincent Ialenti
Vincent Ialenti

Vincent Ialenti (he/him) is a research associate at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt’s Department of Environmental Studies. He is the author of Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press), an ethnographic study of how Finland’s nuclear waste experts reckoned with far future societies, bodies, and ecosystems. He holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Cornell University.

Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz

Annalee Newitz (they/them) writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of three novels: The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their forthcoming book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, explores the dark art of manipulation through weaponized storytelling. Annalee is a writer for The New York Times and elsewhere, and has a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others, and co-host the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Malka Older
Malka Older

Malka Older (she/her) is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and The Washington Post. Her novella The Mimicking of Known Successes, a murder mystery set on a gas giant planet, came out in March 2023 to rave reviews, and the sequel, The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, was released in February 2024. She created the serial Ninth Step Station on Realm and the acclaimed short story collection And Other Disasters (2019). She has a doctorate in the sociology of organizations from Sciences Po and is a faculty associate at Arizona State University, where she teaches on humanitarian aid and predictive fictions, and hosts the Science Fiction Sparkle Salon. Her opinions can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and NBC THINK, among other places.

PAGES Matam
PAGES Matam

PAGES Matam (they/he) is a genderqueer med-school dropout turned award-winning multi-hyphenate born and raised in Cameroon, Central Africa. A multi-lingual pleasure advocate and agent of imagination, they love battle horror anime and fried plantains as much as crafting poetry and high-concept dramas centering Queer Black liberation and their immigrant experience fueled by Toni Morrison’s words: “the function of freedom is to free someone else.” www.pagesmatam.com | twitter.com/@pagesofle

Tochi Onyebuchi
Tochi Onyebuchi

Tochi Onyebuchi (he/him) is the author of Goliath and Riot Baby, a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and the World Fantasy Award. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and NPR, among other places. He has earned degrees from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies.

Paul D. Miller
Paul D. Miller

​​Paul D. Miller (he/him), aka DJ Spooky, is currently Artist in Residence at Yale University’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media. He is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer whose work engages audiences in a blend of genres, global culture, and environmental and social issues. Miller has collaborated with an array of recording artists, including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Metallica, Chuck D from Public Enemy, Steve Reich, and Yoko Ono amongst many others. His 2018 album, DJ Spooky Presents: Phantom Dancehall, debuted at #3 on Billboard Reggae. His large-scale, multimedia performance pieces include Rebirth of a Nation; Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and Seoul Counterpoint, written during his 2014 residency at Seoul Institute of the Arts. His multimedia project Sonic Web premiered at San Francisco’s Internet Archive in 2019. He was the inaugural artist-in-residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Met Reframed, 2012-2013.

In 2014, Miller was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He produced Pioneers of African American Cinema, a collection of the earliest films made by African American directors, released in 2015. His artwork has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Miami/Art Basel fair, and many other museums and galleries. His books include the award-winning Rhythm Science, published by MIT Press in 2004; Sound Unbound, an anthology about digital music and media; The Book of Ice, a visual and acoustic portrait of the Antarctic; and The Imaginary App, on how apps changed the world. His writing has been published by The Village Voice, The Source, and Artforum, and he was the first founding executive editor of Origin Magazine.

Andrew Liptak
Andrew Liptak

Andrew Liptak (he/him) is a writer and historian. He is the author Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, June 2022), and co-editor of War Stories: New Military Science Fiction. As a journalist, he’s written for a number of outlets, including Gizmodo, Polygon, Slate, and The Verge. He currently writes a newsletter about science fiction and storytelling called Transfer Orbit. He lives in Vermont with his wife and two children.

Madeline Ashby
Madeline Ashby

Madeline Ashby graduated from the first cohort of the master’s programme in strategic foresight and innovation at OCADU in 2011. It was her second master’s degree. (Her first, in interdisciplinary studies, focused on cyborg theory, fan culture, and Japanese animation!) Since 2011, she has been a freelance consulting futurist specializing in scenario development and science fiction prototypes. She is also the author of the Machine Dynasty series from Angry Robot books, and Glass Houses and Company Town from Tor Books, and a contributor to How To Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange, with Scott Smith. She is a member of the AI Policy Futures Group at the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, and the XPRIZE Sci-Fi Advisory Council. Her work has appeared in BoingBoing, Slate, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.