The Future is Near

I was thrilled to find out this week that the two short stories I submitted to the Virtual Futures Near-Future Fictions team have both been selected to be read and recorded at their events in London.

The first event will be held on 20th February at The Library, Covent Garden, where 8 stories about the potential future of disease will be performed. Multi-award winning science fiction author, Geoff Ryman, has been announced as a special guest and will be giving a talk and reading of his own. I have a brand new story – Toxic Duck Inc – for this event, in which the protagonist tells of her terrifying experience with a new kind of virus affecting the human brain. The recording will be shared publicly on YouTube later in the year, but for those of you who are local there are tickets available to attend the live event here.

The second event is on 20th March, at the same venue, and the theme of this one is potential futures for personality. My story – The Test – follows a protagonist desperate to gain a badge of authenticity in order to promote her crowd-funded brand. Like Toxic Duck Inc, this is a brand new story written especially for Virtual Futures.

In a similar vein to the successful UK series Black Mirror, the idea of these stories is to highlight possible ‘traffic jams not automobiles’, so I can’t wait to hear what mind-bending ideas the other authors have come up with!

Virtual Futures are an organisation committed to exploring the convergence of art, culture, philosophy, science and technology. They regularly run conferences with high profile guests and field experts, which are later made available for free on their YouTube channel.

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Have you ever wondered how future technology will affect the human psyche? What defines the line between imagination and reality? Whether it is possible to find spirituality in science? Check out my new book, Fragments of Perception, for 36 quirky, bite-sized stories to make you contemplate!