Ocean State Libraries

"What does the future hold? Ten speculative short stories by leading young-adult authors imagine what the world could be through the lens of technologies emerging today. When the modification industry transforms how humans look, sound, and interact, a nonbinary teen braves the 'reinvention room' to accept a gift from the dead. In an accidental city in space, a young apprentice holds neighborhoods together with braided carbon filaments until distraction...

"An anthology of near-future science fiction from VICE's acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination, Terraform--in print for the first time"--

The author surveys the traces we will leave for peoples in the very distant future. He shows that modern civilization has created objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time, including the plastic polluting the oceans, the nuclear waste entombed within the earth, and the thirty million miles of paved roads spanning the planet. This is his meditation on climate change and the Anthropocene, and an urgent search for fossils--industrial,...

"After the ravages of the Green Winter, Earth is a place of deep jungles and monstrous animals. The last of the human race is divided into surface dwellers and the people who live in the Upper Settlement, a ring perched at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere.Bearing witness to this divided planet is Pearl, a young techie with a thread of shuvani blood, who lives in the isolated forests of Gobari, navigating her mad mother and the strange blue light...

"When Martha Einkorn fled her father's isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she's surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her fathers fox and rabbit sermononce a parable to...

To the shock of high school student Skyler Finch, her romantic future, as revealed by a mysterious website, lies with the arrogant and annoying Truman Alexander.-- There's a lot of things about Truman Alexander that Skyler Finch finds incredibly annoying. She does her best to avoid him and focus on the important stuff: friends, school, and her boyfriend, Eli. His promposal was perfect and the future is looking bright. Or is it? When Skylar's phone...

"In the year 2119, instantaneous transportation technology has altered almost every facet of human civilization, improving countless industries and practices while also leaving behind a growing population who can't afford to keep up. But some people still prefer the traditional ways of getting from point A to point B, including Tristan Keys, a writer who refuses to embrace the technological advances everyone finds so mandatory. When tiny cracks start...

"This manuscript examines the relationship between architecture, urban design, and science fiction in postwar Japan, focusing on Metabolism, an avant-garde architectural movement formed in 1960 and influenced by the science fiction of Komatsu Sakyô, who collaborated with Metabolist architects during the 1970 World Expo in Osaka. By envisioning both utopian and apocalyptic (sci-fi) futures, Metabolist architects imagined large-scale megastructures...

Soon-to-be twelve-year-old June is a planner and a problem-solver, and right now she and her friend Calvin are planning a big welcome home celebration for her mother, only her plan falls apart when she finds out that her parents are getting a divorce; June is convinced that she can find some way to get her parents back together--until she starts getting messages on her "new" laptop (refurbished by a mysterious store called The Shop of Last Resort),...

"An island of magic and mayhem floating above the flooded Earth, Bastion has long been the last country left in the world. Then one day best friends Kurt (an eight-foot mushroom with a fear of heights) and Flicker (a tiny, tough-talking gemstone faerie) stand on the edge of the land and see the impossible: a plane from nowhere is heading straight for them. Kurt and Flicker join forces with a brave gang of misfits -- including wood-nymph twins (one...