A collection of sci-fi stories claiming to portray a "better future." More specifically, according to the forward: no dystopia nor any technology so advanced that the world has little/no relation to our own. I question whether some of the futures presented in these stories are "better," though I generally enjoyed reading all of the tales.

The stories in this collection considered futures with changes in social, environmental, & economic conditions. I found those that tackled the former two to be more compelling than those that focused more on the last, though that is likely due to my own personal interests. Even those tales with concepts I found less interesting, I still found entertaining.

At the end of each story, the editors provide URLs to extra content - e.g., discussions & technical papers on the technology in each story. I sure wish these URLs still worked ( )

Some good stories, others are tech bro fantasies. Odd visions of a "better" future.... ( )

Three stars is an average; some stories were self-important and tiresome ("Atmosphæra Incognita", "A Hotel in Antarctica," “The Man Who Sold the Stars”, "The Man Who Sold the Moon") but some had ideas I'll be thinking about for a long time ("Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl", "Entanglement", "Degrees of Freedom" and especially "Covenant.") ( )

This is a book of short stories born of Project Hieroglyph:
http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

This is seriously one of the most exciting things I've heard about in quite awhile. A bunch of sci-fi authors and a bunch of scientists are getting together and saying "We're sick of these dystopias that have become so popular! Let's look for ways the world could be made a better place in the near term!" This is a big part of what sci-fi is all about, to me.

Digging down into the individual stories in the book: some are "meh," a couple left me wondering how the future they're painting is a "better world," but many of them are absolutely mindblowingly amazing. More than once, I had to just put the book down after I'd finished a story, and process it and think about it for a long time before I could even think about picking anything else up. Some of these futures, some of these technologies, I WANT! So! Much!

I'll try to write up some specific thoughts on the individual stories here; it may be a couple of weeks though:
http://ciaracatscifi.blogspot.com/

Quite a few of these stories will be on my Hugo nomination short list. ( )

The 2,5 stories I re-read were well enough done that I had no painful memories of them, but I had no powerful memories either. ( )