The most widely distributed and yet most seldom read science fiction has got to be tech company Terms and Conditions.
Lawyers are trained to artificially constrain the future in favor of their clients. To get the best financial outcome, they try to collapse the possibility space of what might happen as far as they can. This is why you get statements in publisher contracts that look like:
The Author grants to the Publisher, and the publisher’s successors, licensees, and assigns, exclusive worldwide rights… in all media now known or hereafter devised.*
Who knows what media might be invented in the future? Not the lawyers, but they know their clients want to own it. Corporate Terms and Conditions operate along the same lines.
Frederik Pohl famously said, “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” This year, as you read the stories in Think Weirder, I’d like you to think about how our modern science fiction authors are taking this one step further. In this anthology, authors aren’t predicting traffic jams – they’re predicting the equivalents of contracts that decrease your auto insurance by letting your insurance company spy on your driving habits, or the monthly subscriptions to use smart features that are already built into your car. In short, they’re predicting what happens when new ways to measure and control the world (however imperfectly) meet market dynamics.
Human clones are not a new prediction, but what if selling your genome to escape your family as a teenager results in a dating app telling your ex-husband years later that he’s a 97% match with your clone? Tia Tashiro explores these second-order effects on matching algorithms in Missing Helen. In Joseph Weber’s Jennifer Does Pushups, a woman who has turned selling her gut biome into a livelihood doesn’t read the Terms and Conditions, and runs face-first into the fact that tissue stops being yours once it leaves your body. Isabel J. Kim’s Wire Mother imagines a world where you can build a spouse to spec and then rent a body for it to operate in the real world, which leads to the brutally incisive point that once anything can be bought to spec, the market sets what counts as normal. In Avi Burton’s The Wi-Fi Womb, the Terms and Conditions interrupt a false miscarriage with “For further details on your condition, upgrade your subscription for a one-time fee of only $8.99!”
Even the literal hereafter can be sold to your insurance company and priced according to your budget, as Koji A. Dae describes in Five Impossible Things. Similar second- and third-order thinking underpins stories about securitized lives (Alex Irvine’s Shorted), contracts that send information back from the future (Ted Kosmatka’s The Signal and the Idler), and a company that has shed virtually all of its humans (Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Human Resources).
All of this is sold by companies that have Terms and Conditions, which you need special tools to read. Anyone literate can read the literal words, but to actually judge a contract you have to be able to imagine the futures it is constraining. If you can only imagine the future they’re selling you, then you don’t have the tools to adequately read the implications of the contract. In last year’s introduction to Think Weirder, I talked about how much my kids like to show me stuff, and how my story curation is an extension of that basic impulse. I am now extending that extension – I want you to read both the words and the implications (to my kids: if you’re reading this many years from now, I love you).
In Peter Watts’ The Twenty-One Second God, a character says “Dreams are just injections of noise to prevent overfitting.” Think of the stories in this book as structured noise to help your brain not overfit on one worldview. The value of science fiction is not in how many automobiles it predicts. The value lies in the volume of incorrect but plausible futures your brain can learn from.
A single science fiction story has a negligible impact, but a habit of reading science fiction has immense value. As a science fiction reader, when your own personal hereafter arrives, whether at a doctor’s office or on a screen of Terms and Conditions, I hope you’ll gain some small satisfaction in recognizing it instead of being surprised by it. And in the meantime, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the fact that a mind containing a richer model of the future is a more interesting mind to live in.
*Think Weirder’s author contract does not look like this.
If you enjoyed this essay, check out the book it came from.
Think Weirder Volume 2 collects my favorite stories from 2025, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Greg Egan, Isabel J. Kim, Peter Watts, Nancy Kress, and more.