David Brin - Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

The first work of science fiction I can remember reading was Eleanor Camerons 1954 novel, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet . It was perhaps more fantasy than science fiction, but the story of young boys who build their own spaceship with the help of a mysterious inventor struck a chord.

As a child growing up, I was always trying to create things, build things, or tinker. I loved taking apart old tube radios and putting them back together in slightly different ways to see what I would get. Once I turned an old radio into a shortwave without really understanding how Id done it. Another time I did a spectacular job of blowing one up (much to my mothers consternation).

As my reading matured, so did my taste in science fiction, but I always tended toward the hard science fiction where science and the act of invention was the major component. I particularly loved stories that put scientists and inventors themselves into the middle of the action. Robert Heinleins 1958 novel Have Space SuitWill Travel was one of my favorites. A young science-crazy boythe son of an eccentric scientistwins a space suit in a contest and goes on a galaxy-spanning adventure. Just thinking about it still brings a smile to my lips.

Science fiction inspired me as a scientist. It jump-started my imagination and gave me energy and a sense of optimism that I could do anything with my mind. Without that optimism and belief in the possible, I dont think I would have been successful either in creating an operating system (Mach) that has impacted hundreds of millions of Apple devices or in taking on the task of building Microsoft Research into one of the top basic research organizations in the world.

This book is an anthology of original stories inspired by science and scientists. The authorssome of the best and most decorated in the fieldeach visited Microsoft Research and met with top researchers in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, programming languages, and operating systems. They were given a unique opportunity to see new technologies under development and understand how researchers think and work.

The stories that came out of this process are the kind of science fiction that excited me as boy. They draw upon, highlight, and extrapolate current science. A number of them put scientists and engineers front and center in the narrative.

Seanan McGuire questions the limits of machine translation in her story Hello, Hello. In The Machine Starts, Greg Bear considers the intendedand unintendedconsequences of quantum computing. Elizabeth Bears Skin in the Game imagines a world in which technology can be used to share emotions. Nancy Kress explores the frontiers of machine intelligence with the aptly titled Machine Learning. In Riding with the Duke, Jack McDevitt investigates the social and emotional implications of immersive technologies. The graphic novel A Cops Eye, by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, creates a future world in which a policewomans sidekick is an artificial intelligence. Robert J. Sawyer explores the possibilities that computer science could bring to our hunt for alien civilizations in Looking for Gordo. David Brin examines the science of prediction in The Tell. And in Another Word for World, Ann Leckie explores the immense power of tools that facilitate communication across cultures.