Seat 14C: science fiction stories about the year 2037

This video is the beginning of a story, the story of a plane taking off from an airport in 2017 and landing in San Francisco in 2037.

The finale is open because it’s a science fiction story contest in which several well-known authors, Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Bruce Sterling, Hugh Howey or Mike Resnic, continue the story from the perspective of the passengers of the flight. You can navigate through the stories by clicking on the plane seats.

If you look closely, there’s a special seat: the 14C. This seat was free and from XPrize, a non-profit educational organization whose mission is to make radical advances for the benefit of humanity, in collaboration with ANA, a Japanese 5-star airline, they encouraged anyone to write their own version of the story and upload it. Right now if you click on the seat you can read the story of the winner (the contest is from August 2017)

Very interesting format to enhance the imagination and creation of future scenarios. I particularly like the criteria for evaluating the stories: unique vision of the future, relationship with the initial story, and alignment with a techno-optimist vision of the future. This last point is very important because we tend to imagine dystopian, pessimistic futures. Perhaps because a dystopian future is conclusive (it’s complicated to become utopian) and a utopian future is always a transition to something else…. What do you think?

#365daysof #futurism #stories #scifi #day173