Welcome to the first issue of Voices/Future Tense (V/FT), a webzine devoted to the stories and art of the Orion’s Arm project.
Many of you will already be familiar with the Orion’s Arm setting. For those of you who came here afresh, Orion’s Arm is an open source, hard science-fiction, shared universe, in which interested artists and writers can explore over ten thousand years of future history:
… Our goal is to create a dramatic far-future universe that is internally consistent and abides as much as possible with the accepted facts and theories in the physical, biological, and social sciences. Thus matter cannot travel faster than light, matter and energy are conserved, no evolved humanoid aliens have been discovered, future ultratech social issues are likely to be very different to those of today, and so on. We embrace speculative ideas like drexlerian assemblers, mind uploads, posthuman intelligences, femtotech, magnetic monopoles, wormholes, as it is proposed that future sciences, technologies, and developments will make these possible. And we attempt a logical explanation for even the most fantastic-seeming elements in OA. We aim to paint a future that is plausible at every level, from the scientific to the social to the psychological.
Founded in 2000 by M Alan Kaslev and Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn as a mailing list, the project has grown steadily. The principal website for the project, Orion’s Arm, is a repository of articles, essays, and monographs, covering everything from hard science articles to speculations on the course of transhuman development. The site is also home to an extraordinary “reference work”, the Encyclopedia Galactica:
5×1019 bits of information
making up 1011 articles.
8,000 years of scholarship,
plus integrated and friendly help wizards, expert systems, and compatible interfaces
make the Encyclopedia Galactica the definitive reference work for the Civilized Galaxy
…and more articles are hammered out every month.
V/FT was conceived as an addition to this expanding project. Here, we will focus on the stories that come from such a diverse milieu. Our authors will take us with them as they explore the immense breadth and depth of this setting.
It should be an amazing ride.
We also hope to provide reviews of other science fiction works with themes and concerns similar to those of the OA setting; and we’ll also try and provide news of the contemporary world… with an OA, transhumanist bent.
We look forward to sharing what we’ve done so far… and bringing you along, as we continue to explore this most amazing universe.