What would you think about a mask that allows you to enjoy the synthesized smells of fine cuisine? How about a floating house for people displaced by higher sea levels due to climate change? These are among the ideas that Sony Group Corp. have dreamed up -- all based on stories created through a collaboration between science fiction writers and Sony's young in-house designers. Such stories offer a peek into the future envisioned through an author's bold imagination, with details of the imagined futures used to develop prospective products and services. This method is called sci-fi prototyping. While the COVID-19 pandemic has presented scenes like those from a sci-fi movie, such as eerily empty cities due to lockdowns, Japanese companies such as Sony are starting to explore unconventional methods to come up with novel ideas.

When Chen Qiufan took a trip to the southwest Chinese province of Yunnan 15 years ago, he noticed that time seemed to slow down as he reached the city of Lijiang. Chen was a recent college graduate with a soul-sucking real estate job in the pressure-cooker metropolis of Shenzhen, and Lijiang was a backpacker's refuge. Wandering through the small city, he was enchanted by the serrated rows of snow-capped mountains on the horizon and the schools of fish swimming through meandering canals. But he was also unnerved by the throngs of city dwellers like himself--burned out, spiritually lost, adrift. He wove his observations together into a short story called " The Fish of Lijiang," about a depressed office worker who travels to a vacation town, only to discover that everything is artificially engineered--from the blue sky to the fish in the streams to the experience of time itself.

"Artificial Gods," a collection of stories about artificial intelligence, has been published by New Star Press. It includes 14 tales by 12 Chinese science fiction writers, including some Galaxy Award winners such as "Where the Wind Starts" by Zhang Ran, "Gate of the Machines" by Jiang Bo and "Previous Dusk" by Luo Longxiang. All the stories are about the relationship between humans and AI and worries about a future with AI. In the stories, AI can be a powerful destroyer or an innocent creature. Artificial intelligence is a popular theme for science fiction.

Whether it's a terrorist incident or a major fire, civil defence and emergency services need to rehearse their responses to ensure they are as effective as possible. The situations imagined by the red team – made up of a handful of writers – will be acted out by those first-responders.

In recent months the science fiction world has grown increasingly political, with dozens of writers contributing stories to anthologies such as Resist: Tales from a Future Worth Fighting Against and If This Goes On. Another prominent example is A People's Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams. "I wanted to use my position as an editor to try to help magnify the voices of the people that we invited to participate in this anthology," Adams says in Episode 354 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "To sort of shout back at the Trump administration, and also to try to imagine some new futures that might help us figure out how to get back to normal from here." The book draws inspiration (and its title) from Howard Zinn's counterculture classic A People's History of the United States, and like that earlier work, A People's Future of the United States tries to present a wide variety of marginalized perspectives.

At the 2018 Worldcon, fantasy author N.K. Jemisin became the first person to ever win three consecutive Hugo awards for Best Novel. Given that level of success, science fiction editor John Joseph Adams felt she'd be the perfect guest editor for the latest edition of his anthology series The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. "Given that she's clearly the face of the genre at the moment, I thought it would be wonderful to have her as guest editor," Adams says in Episode 342 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And thankfully she said yes." Caroline M. Yoachim, whose short story "Carnival Nine" appears in the book, says the 20 stories selected by Jemisin reflect the growing diversity of the fantasy and science fiction field. "One of the things I loved about the book was just the sheer variety of it," Yoachim says.

On Oct. 11, in Washington, Future Tense will host a free screening of WarGames, followed by a discussion with Open Technology Institute director Kevin Bankston and sci-fi author Malka Older. This year, John Badham's WarGames--one of the movies most beloved by hackers, techies, and tech policy wonks (like me!)--celebrates its 35th anniversary. Though it may look a little kitschy now, it was notable for several firsts: It was the first popular film depiction of the now well-known hacker archetype. It raised the specter of an artificial intelligence starting World War III a year before James Cameron's The Terminator did, and it introduced America to a young Matthew Broderick. WarGames is the alternately lighthearted and deadly serious tale of a wargaming A.I. at U.S. missile command that almost sparks a nuclear war after being broken into by a troublesome but well-intentioned teenage hacker.

The world's oldest technology magazine is the MIT Technology Review. Published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2011 it produced a special supplement of original science fiction stories written by top writers from the genre. The Review says its normal mission is to identify important new technologies, and decipher the practical impact they will have on our lives. The sci-fi edition - with contributors such as Cory Doctorow and Elizabeth Bear - was an attempt to do that in an unusual way. The magazine called this "hard" sci-fi.