Afterparty Overdrive — Simon Ings

Futures and fiction from the makers of New Scientist.

We're incredible. The lot of of us. The species. We've been throwing the wildest party this planet has ever seen, and right now we're at our most prosperous, most peaceable, most affluent, most healthy.

True, our resources are dwindling, and our life-support systems are strained almost beyond repair. But not every party ends in tears, and the writers for this issue of Arc are determined to party past the current hangover.

Welcome, then, to Arc's afterparty: Neal Stephenson brings us to our feet; Broadway producer David Binder takes us to the new festival; Justin Pickard and Simon Ings find rough pleasure in the streets; Sumit Paul-Choudhury gets us onto the guest list for the singularity disco; and Christina Agapakis shows off her garden of biohacked delights.

And this issue's original fiction edges us even closer to the future. open-source celebrities run amok in Lavie Tidhar's Changing Faces; smash-and-grab shoppers run amock in Tim Maughan's Limited Edition. David Gullen's tale of second-place spacefarers, All Your Futures, wryly celebrates humanity's Outward Urge, while Nan Craig's Scrapmetal drops a cyborg killing machine into Port Talbot.

Each quarter, Arc explores the future through cutting-edge science fiction and forward-looking essays by some of the world's most celebrated authors, alongside columns by thinkers and practitioners from the worlds of books, design, gaming, film and more.