In 1967, British philosopher Philippa Foot unwittingly created one of the internet's most regurgitated memes. A runaway train is hurtling towards five people tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever to divert the train to a different track to which only one person is tied. Do you intervene to kill the one and spare the five? What if one of the tracks twisted into a really cool loop-the-loop?

This year at Future Tense Fiction we've spent a lot of time thinking about how, in many ways, 2021 has felt a lot like 2020. But at the same time, so much has changed--how we work and think, how we commute, how we interact with animals, technology, and our fellow humans. This year we published 11 stories (we took December off!) that touch upon relationships, transportation, right to repair and supply chain shortages, communication, information overload and scarcity, and much, much more. We broadly explored themes like learning futures, with Simon Brown's "Speaker" (where humans learn to communicate with other species and struggle to overcome the assumption of human excellence), Leigh Alexander's "The Void" (about the struggle with information scarcity in an information-overloaded world) and Shiv Ramdas' "The Trolley Solution" (about a university attempting to automate how it teaches its students), as well as ideas of mobility--a theme we're continuing into 2022, so stay tuned--with Linda Nagata's "Ride" (about a neighborhood that's embraced an algorithm to run all of its traffic and transit patterns). We began publishing fiction back in 2016 and made it monthly as of January 2018.

An expert on the social implications of technology responds to Shiv Ramdas' "The Trolley Solution." Imagine a university without any teachers, just peer learners, open-access resources, and an office space full of high-speed internet-enabled computers, accessible to anyone between 18–30 years of age, regardless of any prior learning. That university is called 42. It does not have any academic instructors; the teachers are the self-starting students who have their eyes set on a job in Big Tech. Aided only by a problem-based learning curriculum, students gain a certificate of completion about three to five years after starting out.