A stimulating collection of science fiction stories has the welcome and successful intent of celebrating the “diverse energies” of writers today and the futures they imagine, although a number of those are decidedly bleak. Many of the contributors are writers of color and most of the stories feature characters that are racially and ethnically diverse. It is our world today, projected on a future in which divisions of economics and the possibilities and pitfalls of technology are even more profound. Daniel H. Wilson describes the first days of a robot revolt in the unsettlingly entertaining “Freshee’s Frogurt.” In K. Tempest Bradford’s “Uncertainty Principle,” reality constantly shapeshifts for Iliana, whose past keeps changing because the time/space continuum is being manipulated. Two teenage boys, young lovers, seek a place to call their own in Rahul Kanakia’s bleak Los Angeles of “Next Door.” Paolo Bacigalupi’s “A Pocket Full of Dharma” imagines current political tensions and technology spinning into a future where a homeless boy in the slums of a Chinese city finds himself in possession of the mind and soul of the young Dali Llama, which has been downloaded to a data cube. And Ursula LeGuin’s “Solitude,” about a girl raised among a species on another planet who can’t adjust to human ways of relating, is incredibly original while still reflecting the feel of old-school science fiction. These and other contributions to this mind-expanding work will satisfy science fiction enthusiasts and newcomers to the genre. (Age 12 and older)

A collection of dystopian short stories featuring diverse main characters and by authors of color.

"No one can doubt that the wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. No one can doubt that cooperation in the pursuit of knowledge must lead to freedom of the mind and freedom of the soul." -President John F. Kennedy, from a speech at University of California, March 23, 1962

In a world gone wrong, heroes and villains are not always easy to distinguish and every individual has the ability to contribute something powerful.

In this stunning collection of original and rediscovered stories of tragedy and hope, the stars are a diverse group of students, street kids, good girls, kidnappers, and child laborers pitted against their environments, their governments, differing cultures, and sometimes one another as they seek answers in their dystopian worlds. Take a journey through time from a nuclear nightmare of the past to society's far future beyond Earth with these eleven stories by masters of speculative fiction. Includes stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, Ursula K. Le Guin, Malinda Lo, Cindy Pon, Daniel H. Wilson, and more.