Overmorrow: Stories of Our Bright Future

News feed getting you down? Spending too much time hate-reading and doom-scrolling?

Grab a collection of science fiction, cast your eyes starward, and put the current moment in perspective.

'An Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!'
- Abraham Lincoln

"OVERMORROW: Stories of our Bright Future" is an anthology of science fiction short stories set in an optimistic future. From classic Golden Age style science fiction to wicked satire, from solarpunk to parody. Colony ships bound for distant solar systems, humans (and chickens) on Mars, Transhumanism and medical revolutions.

This collection will transport you out of the present day to the bright future of the day-after-tomorrow.

CW Hawes’s story The Sun is but a Distant Star starts with a colony ship discovering a world unexpectedly already colonized by humans. It harkens back to Heinlein and Bradbury and delivers on the promise of our bubblepunk cover (designed by the incomparable Yolande Kleinn).
In Martian Chicken Man Bokerah Brumley contributes the first of two stories in the anthology set on Mars - clearly the near-future of human settlement on Mars is one that captures all the best that humanity can achieve.
[Worth noting here that both CW and Bokerah write extensively in post-apocalyptic worlds, as well; it is rewarding for us as anthologists to solicit this sort of optimism from each of them.]
Mike Pauly takes the world of transhumanism and adds a twist in Thesseus’s Guy. It’s a bright vision of the world (though seen through a wicked family drama).
Then we offer a pair of interesting duos:
First, two stories in near-future, high-tech settings that go straight to the theme of the anthology: the power of technology to do good (though sometimes with unintended consequences).
John Olsen’s Working on Cloud Nine about an orbiting waste recycling satellite, and Allen Baird’s The Multicoloured Plain about the future of medical technology.
The other pairing is set in the far future: Curtis Edmond’s low sci-fi Detour, aboard a multi-generational colony ship flung at high speed toward a distant star; and then Karina Fabian’s satire Doall’s Brain, which pays homage to one (or more?) of the great TV science fiction franchises.
Then we return to near-future, low-sci-fi with three stories that illustrate how the human spirit can create a bright future, even against an otherwise challenging backdrop:
In Perspectives, Lela Markham contemplates the impacts of a global pandemic and humanity’s response, finding in it the truth that what perseveres is family, loyalty, and love.
NK Williams’s The Courage to Care takes us to a world of communal living and follows a restless soul who self-exiles to discover greater truths about herself and her role in the world.
And David Walls-Kaufman takes us to a world in Buffalo Family Safari where technology is nearly omnipotent but still unable to prevent a mother and teenage son from drifting apart.
Then we’re back to Mars in Glenn Damato’s Freedom and Luck, which juxtaposes the safety of the third generation of Martian settlers with the travails of the first.
And we wrap with a solarpunk story that shows that medical advances can change the life of not just one person but all of those around her as well.: Lyssa Chiavari’s Being Tamika.