FEATURING
Elizabeth Bear
Greg Bear
David Brin
Blue Delliquanti & Michele Rosenthal
Nancy Kress
Ann Leckie
Jack McDevitt
Seanan McGuire
Robert J. Sawyer
Illustrations by Joey Camacho / Raw & Rendered
Edited by Microsoft & Melcher Media
Published by
Produced by
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
www.microsoft.com
124 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.melcher.com
Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft
Copyright © 2015 Microsoft
“The Machine Starts” copyright © 2015 by Greg Bear – “Skin in the Game” copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Bear – “The Tell” copyright © 2015 by David Brin – “Machine Learning” © 2015 by Nancy Kress – “Another Word for World” copyright © 2015 by Ann Leckie – “Riding with the Duke” copyright © 2015 by Jack McDevitt – “Hello, Hello” copyright © 2015 by Seanan McGuire – “Looking for Gordo” copyright © 2015 by Robert J. Sawyer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.
ISBN 978-1-59591-093-6
First Edition
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword by Harry Shum
Introduction by Rick Rashid
Hello, Hello by Seanan McGuire
The Machine Starts by Greg Bear
Skin in the Game by Elizabeth Bear
Machine Learning by Nancy Kress
Riding With the Duke by Jack McDevitt
A Cop’s Eye by Blue Delliquanti & Michele Rosenthal
Looking for Gordo by Robert J. Sawyer
The Tell by David Brin
Another Word for World by Ann Leckie
FOREWORD
Does the science fiction influence the science, or does the science influence the science fiction?
Throughout my life, I have personally been influenced by both. I grew up in 1960s China, in a society in the midst of change. It was a decade of monumental technological advancements—man in space, satellites, supersonic jets, the emergence of new computing systems and languages.
It was also considered by many to be a heyday of science fiction. TV shows like Star Trek went mainstream. Science fiction paperbacks became best sellers for the first time. Movies like Planet of the Apes defined a new kind of blockbuster.
I remember talking to my dad about computers. Many people, including him, hadn’t actually seen them, but they had heard about them and knew that they would be “big,” with the potential to change our world. He pushed me to pursue my studies around this completely new field.
Spurred on by both the science and science fiction of our time, my generation of researchers and engineers grew up to ask what if? and what’s next? We went on to pursue new disciplines like computer vision, artificial intelligence, real-time speech translation, machine learning, and quantum computing.
Today—years and years later—we are realizing much of what we dreamed of as kids. Space is no longer the final frontier.
So what is? Even those “communicators” we saw in science fiction TV shows and movies we now take for granted as part of our daily lives. Your smartphone is probably in your pocket right now.
So what’s next? Twenty years ago, Microsoft made an investment in natural language research. When we started, we didn’t know where it would go, or how long it would take. We had all seen it in Star Trek and dreamed of how we could make it a reality. Now, that technology is shipping in Skype—real-time translation in six languages. We’re not there with Klingon yet, but hopefully someday in the future we may be.
Today, I have the privilege of leading Microsoft’s research efforts, where I’m surrounded by people who were influenced by science and science fiction, as I was. We interact with and publicize our research work across a global community of thought leaders and innovators, including science fiction writers. We invite them to our campus to share their stories with us and so we can share our work with them.
With this collection of short stories, we bring our worlds—fact and fantasy—together once again. The authors all had the opportunity to visit with our researchers to hear about their latest thinking and see their leading-edge work, and to create fiction inspired by that work.
My hope for you as a reader is that you will be inspired by these stories, as I was by the popular science fiction of my time. May they incite you to pursue a new field of study, to chase a possibility you think impossible, to let your imagination take you to places you never thought you could go—for we are only limited by our imaginations.
Harry Shum
Executive Vice President, Technology and Research
Microsoft
INTRODUCTION
The first work of science fiction I can remember reading was Eleanor Cameron’s 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 I’d done it. Another time I did a spectacular job of blowing one up (much to my mother’s 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 Heinlein’s 1958 novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel was one of my favorites. A young science-crazy boy—the son of an eccentric scientist—wins 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 don’t 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 authors—some of the best and most decorated in the field—each 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.