Last year we asked a dozen or so writers to travel somewhere in the world—Budapest, Cape Town, Houston, any sleep or sleepless outpost they could find—and send back a story set in that spot fifteen years from now, in the year 2024. Only ten returned alive (and Doerr with a broken leg), but their stories are what you'll find here. The predictions, at least on the municipal level, are pretty grim—not enough good water, too much bad water, several distressing developments in personal electronics. But civilization persists nevertheless, and it offers some small consolation that each of these stories provides a picture of the little guy or gal persistently carving out a life. One reason we asked our writers to look ahead on fifteen years, in stead of fifty or five hundred, is because we wanted to hear about where we'd be—to see what the world could look like when things had shifted just a bit, as it seems like they're starting to, heading into the second decade of the third millennium, with the long presence of our forty-third president come to an end and a semitangible future at last seeming imminent. For better or for worse, this feels like a dynamic moment, in the world and in the work we do with ink and paper and in the changing physiques of our editorial board, who are all twelve years old, if you didn't know that. The best fiction set in years ahead can deepen that feeling of impending possibility; these stories, we think, are grounded in that spirit, and now is a good time to read them.
Editor: Dave Eggers
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