Future futurist gigs in the future

This year has already been pretty busy, in terms of my foresight work. In January, I ran a workshop at a Day Zero event for Engineers Without Borders Canada AGM. That same month, editors started contacting me about including my story Social Services, which I wrote for an Institute for the Future anthology on the coming age of networked matter, in their “year’s best” anthologies. Then I gave a talk at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium. And this weekend, I’ll be delivering a keynote on design fiction at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

This summer, I’ll visit Washington, DC to do a three-day workshop on narrative and foresight. Then I’ll head to the World Future Society to attend a symposium on science fiction and teach a workshop on stratifying scenarios so they feel lived-in and real (because your ideal user and the person who uses your product/service/platform are often very different). After that I’m off to LonCon 3, which I will probably start calling “Long Con” after I look at my credit card statement.

In the fall, I might finally learn if the fudning my team applied for to develop a videogame about cybersecurity came through. It’s sort of a mixture of Serial Experiments Lain, Perfect Blue, and Veronica Mars, so I’m hoping it comes through. September marks the publication of the Hieroglyph anthology, inspired by a keynote given by Neal Stephenson and work done between SF writers and faculty at Arizona State’s Center for Science and the Imagination. September is also when my next novel, Company Town arrives on store shelves, or in your phone, or between your nightmares. As that happens, I’ll be working on finishing the Machine Dynasty series with an evil little novel called Rev, and working on stories for a couple of anthologies.

And all of that work leads directly into next year, in a way I can’t really discuss yet. Suffice to say it involves more travel, and more grant applications, and a lot of hard work.

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