Press Release: Shareable Futures
Originally published at Grasping for the Wind. Please leave any comments there.
Since I’m always on the lookout for places for free fiction for you, I thought you might want to know about this:
Shareable Futures
Sharing is a big deal these days. Sharing is a growth industry, a new field of study and of practice; it presents a realm of career opportunities, a new way of life, and a concept around which we are restructuring our world. Sharing is the answer to some of today’s biggest questions: How will we meet the needs of the world’s enormous population? How do we reduce our impact on the planet and cope with the destruction already inflicted? How can we each be healthy, enjoy life, and create thriving communities?
Shareable.net invited some of today’s hottest science fiction authors to write stories of shareable futures, where technology has changed the rules of ownership and access, and people share transportation, living spaces, lives, dreams, everything and anything. But these short stories and speculative essays are not utopian propaganda. Instead they give readers troubles and ambiguities, a sense of character and place, compelling narratives and intelligent speculation. Yes, sharing solves problems-but what new problems can it create? What conflicts might it provoke?
Shareable.net launches the Shareable Futures series this week with a short story by the award-winning science fiction author, Boing Boing co-founder and blogger, and copyright activist Cory Doctorow. In his story, “The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening,” Cory gives us a group of creative technological outlaws who dare to project the commons onto the walls of our public space.
As the series rolls on from now through mid-July, you’ll discover some of today’s most visionary and accomplished literary futurists-including Bruce Sterling, Mary Robinnette Kowal, Benjamin Rosebaum, and others-sharing their visions of futures in which we are surviving and even thriving, largely by learning to share our stuff.
We hope that you will find these stories exciting and thought-provoking enough to share them with your readers and appropriate contacts. In the spirit of sharing, we are also inviting readers to share with us their own visions of a shareable future, and we hope that you will participate. As the series continues, I will be sending you reminder emails. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Shareable is a nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects that are bringing a shareable world to life. And we share tools and tips to help you make a shareable world real in your life. In a shareable world, things like clothing swaps, childcare coops, potlucks, carsharing, community gardening, and cohousing bring us together, make life more fun, and free up time and money for the important things in life. When we share, not only is a better life possible, but so is a better world. Shareable is published by CommonSource, a nonpartisan, nonprofit project of Tides Center. Visit us at http://shareable.net/.
Editor Jeremy Adam Smith’s Introduction.