The People

Every world is designed by someone who works on the real thing, and written by someone who can make a reader live there.

Scientists

• Dr Sara Seager, Professor of Planetary Science, Physics and Aerospace Engineering, MIT
• Dr Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT
• Dr Sam Kriegman, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University
• Dr Leroy Cronin, Regius Chair of Chemistry, University of Glasgow
• Dr Sara Imari Walker, Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University
• Dr Penny Boston, NASA Ames Research Center
• Dr Jaco de Swart, Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT
• Estelle Janin, PhD candidate, Arizona State University
• Ranger Liu, MFA and PhD student, University of Washington

Fiction

Ken Liu. Caroline M. Yoachim. S. B. Divya. Mary Robinette Kowal. Fran Wilde.

How it works

A scientist takes a premise far enough that it stops being a thought experiment and starts having a climate, a chemistry and a history. A novelist is given the world and writes from inside it. The images come last, and are constrained by both.

Nobody is asked to guess. They are asked to extrapolate, in public, under their own name.