Communications Breakdown, page 25
Ashley Mackenzie has created illustrations for Omni, Scientific American, Tor, HarperCollins, the New York Times, Riot Games, the Atlantic, Quanta Magazine, ArenaNet, and other venues. Her work can be found at https://www.ashmackenzie.com.
Acknowledgments
Any project like Communications Breakdown is the product of many hard-working, talented people doing their best to create something special. I’m indebted to Susan Buckley at the MIT Press, who has been incredibly patient and supportive throughout this process for the chance to work on this volume and become part of the Twelve Tomorrows team. Assembling anthologies during a pandemic is a strange and awkward business, with many, many factors affecting whether writers are able to deliver stories at all or on time, so I’d like to thank Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Cory Doctorow, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Ken MacLeod, Tim Maughan, Ian McDonald, Anil Menon, Premee Mohamed, and Shiv Ramdas for delivering such wonderful stories, often under appallingly short deadlines. Ashley Mackenzie provided some wonderful art that makes the book look fabulous! I’d also like to sincerely thank A. T. Greenblatt, Vandana Singh, Chinelo Onwualu, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and Indrapramit Das for being a part of the project along the way. I wish things had turned out differently and look forward to working with them all again soon. Special thanks also to Chris Gilliard for agreeing to the interview that features in the volume. My thanks to Melinda Rankin and Kathleen Caruso for their work on copyediting and completing Communications Breakdown (copy editors are the unsung geniuses of this process!), and to the whole MIT Press team.
Contributors
Elizabeth Bear (https://www.elizabethbear.com) was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award–winning author of dozens of novels; over a hundred short stories; and a number of essays, nonfiction pieces, and opinion pieces for markets as diverse as Popular Mechanics and the Washington Post. Her most recent books include the novel The Origin of Storms and collection The Best of Elizabeth Bear. She lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts with her spouse, writer Scott Lynch. Elizabeth is a frequent contributor to the Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU, and has spoken on futurism at Google, MIT, DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Project, and the White House, among others.
S.B. Divya (she/any; https://sbdivya.com) is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She is the Hugo- and Nebula-nominated author of Meru, Machinehood, Runtime, and Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and Other Possible Situations. Her short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she was the coeditor of Escape Pod, a weekly science fiction podcast, from 2017 to 2022. Divya holds degrees in computational neuroscience and signal processing, and she worked for twenty years as an electrical engineer before becoming an author. Born in Pondicherry, India, Divya now resides in Southern California. She enjoys subverting expectations and breaking stereotypes whenever she can.
Cory Doctorow (https://craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and journalist. His latest book is Red Team Blues, first in the Martin Hench series of novels. He is also the author of How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, nonfiction about conspiracies and monopolies; Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; a YA graphic novel called In Real Life; and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, Little Brother, and Attack Surface. His first picture book was Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest nonfiction book is Chokepoint Capitalism, with Rebecca Giblin, about monopoly, monopsony, and fairness in the creative arts labor market. His next science fiction novels for adults is The Lost Cause; and Verso will publish The Internet Con, a nonfiction book about monopoly and radical interoperability. He maintains a daily blog at https://pluralistic.net. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame.
Lavanya Lakshminarayan (she/her) is the author of The Ten Percent Thief (first published as Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future). She’s a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the Times of India AutHer Award and the Valley of Words Award, both prestigious literary awards in India. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The Best of World SF: Volume 2 and Someone in Time: Tales of Time-Crossed Romance. Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Lavanya is occasionally a game designer. She’s crafted worlds for Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars franchises, tinkered with augmented reality experiences, and built battle robots in her living room, among many other game projects. She lives between Bangalore and Hyderabad, India, and she is currently working on her next novel.
Ken MacLeod (https://kenmacleod.blogspot.com) was born on the Isle of Lewis and now lives in Gourock on the Firth of Clyde. He has degrees in biological sciences, worked in IT, and is now a full-time writer. He is the author of nineteen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Beyond the Reach of Earth (2023), and many articles and short stories. He has won three BSFA Awards and three Prometheus Awards and has been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. He was a writer in residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University and a writer in residence for the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University.
Tim Maughan (http://timmaughanbooks.com) is an author and journalist using both fiction and nonfiction to explore issues involving cities, class, culture, technology, and the future. His work has appeared on the BBC and in New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, OneZero, and Vice/Motherboard. His debut novel Infinite Detail was published by FSG in 2019; it was selected by the Guardian as its Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of the Year and short-listed for the Locus Award for Best First Novel. He was a story consultant and writer on the recent Netflix show The Future Of, and uses fiction to help clients as diverse as IKEA and the World Health Organization to think critically about the future. He also collaborates with artists and filmmakers and has had work shown at the V&A, Columbia School of Architecture, the Vienna Biennale, and on Channel 4. He currently lives in Canada.
Ian McDonald is a (mostly) SF writer, living in Northern Ireland, just outside Belfast. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988 and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. He’s been a nominee for all the major SFF awards, and a Hugo, Phillip K. Dick, and BSFA winner, among others. He is the author of Luna: Moon Rising, the conclusion to the Luna trilogy. His most recent novel is Hopeland.
Anil Menon’s most recent work is The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun: Stories (Hachette, 2022), a collection of his speculative short fiction. His novel Half of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2015) was short-listed for the 2016 Hindu Literary Award. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet was short-listed for the 2009 Crossword Book Award and the Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Award. Along with Vandana Singh, he coedited Breaking the Bow (Zubaan Books, 2012), an international anthology of short fiction inspired by the Ramayana. His stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including Arabic, Hebrew, Igbo, and Romanian. He is the chief editor of The Bombay Literary Magazine and a cofounder of the Dum Pukht Writers’ Workshop. His novel The Coincidence Plot (Simon & Schuster) will appear later this year.
Premee Mohamed (https://www.premeemohamed.com) is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a social media manager and assistant editor for Escape Pod, and was a Capital City Press Featured Writer for 2019/2020 with the Edmonton Public Library. She is the author of the Beneath the Rising series of novels, which have been finalists for the Crawford Award, British Fantasy Award, Locus Award, and Aurora Award. Her three novellas have been finalists for the Nebula Award, Aurora Award, Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, British Fantasy Award, and Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. In 2022, she won the Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for her novella And What Can We Offer You Tonight. She also won the Aurora Award for her novella The Annual Migration of Clouds. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog, Escape Pod, Augur, Nightmare Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, and PodCastle. In 2017, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for her story “Willing” (Third Flatiron Press).
Shiv Ramdas (https://shivramdas.net) is a multi-award-nominated author of speculative fiction short stories and novels. He lives and writes in Seattle, Washington, with his wife and three cats. In 2020, he became one of only two Indian writers to ever be nominated for a Hugo, a Nebula, and an Ignyte Award in the same year. He also gained Twitter fame in 2020 for live tweeting the saga of his brother-in-law’s rice mishap. His first novel, Domechild, was India’s first mainstream cyberpunk novel. His short fiction has appeared in Slate, Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, PodCastle, and other publications. He is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. He was previously a radio host, and worked in journalism, advertising, and event management. In addition to his speculative fiction work, he has also penned numerous advertisements, radio segments, audio plays, and resignation letters.
Jonathan Strahan (https://www.jonathanstrahan.com.au) is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award–winning editor, anthologist, and podcaster and has been nominated for the Hugo Award twenty-one times. He has edited more than ninety books, is the reviews editor for Locus, a consulting editor for Tor.com and Tordotcom Publishing, and cohost and producer of the Hugo Award–winning Coode Street Podcast.
Sconosciuto, Communications Breakdown
