Can We Cool Down Data?
The energy demands of data centers—accelerated by artificial intelligence—are steering us toward disaster. Could biology help bring us back from the brink?
Response
Future Tense Fiction
Subsidence
The AI boom means more demands on data centers—and running a data center requires complex technical infrastructure, vast environmental resources, and experienced human talent. In E. G. Condé’s story, a labyrinthine data center is in the middle of a massive outage. When the corporation that owns the center fails to diagnose the problem provoking the outage with its fancy technical systems, it’s forced to turn to human intuition to sniff out a more fundamental dilemma.
Can Your Health Be Boiled Down to a Single Number?
If a medical treatment for a life-threatening disease had a 60% chance of success, but another treatment with a 50% success rate had a lower risk of bankrupting your family, which would you choose? What if the success rates were 95 and 90%? Would you change your answer?
Response
Yellow
If there were an app that estimated the risk of every decision, would you use it? B. Pladek’s short story “Yellow” explores how data changes the way we think about risk—and what happens when that data is manipulated.
Video
Food, Labor, and the Future of “Luxury”: An Interview With Erin K. Wagner
Professor, medievalist, and writer Erin K. Wagner discusses “The Middle,” her August 2025 short story for Future Tense Fiction.
Extreme Environments and Human Nature: An Interview With Margrét Helgadóttir
In Margrét Helgadóttir’s “Tunnel Fever,” an isolated roadside bar buried in a vast network of tunnels on the floor of the Arctic Ocean is staffed by a claustrophobic waitress who dreams of life above the surface. When a pair of outlaws tries to rob the bar, its patrons and employees are forced to work together […]