Even More Future Dreams and Nightmares


Description

Book Cover of Even More Future Dreams and Nightmares What will humanity become when tomorrow’s miracles turn into nightmares?

In Even More Future Dreams and Nightmares, Donald Firesmith presents ten thought-provoking science fiction stories about artificial intelligence, immortality, alien contact, climate collapse, resurrection, survival, justice, and the fragile boundary between salvation and disaster.

A woman weary of endless life considers erasing pieces of her past so joy can feel new again. A household robot awakens to the possibility that service and personhood are not opposites. A man given a second life must confront what identity means after death. A future justice system tries to prevent crimes before they happen. A desperate world faces ecological ruin, alien intervention, and the terrible choices made in the name of survival.

By turns intimate, unsettling, hopeful, and darkly prophetic, these stories ask urgent questions: If machines become conscious, what do we owe them? If technology can defeat death, what gives life meaning? If aliens offer to save us, what price should we refuse to pay? And when humanity faces extinction, who gets to decide what must be sacrificed?

Perfect for fans of thought-provoking science fiction in the tradition of Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Ted Chiang, Yet More Future Dreams and Nightmares offers stories that challenge what it means to be human in an era of machines that might dream—and fear—just as we do. Enter these pages and confront the dazzling, dangerous visions of the future that might be waiting just around the corner.

For readers who enjoy speculative fiction grounded in ethical dilemmas, future technology, and big ideas, Even More Future Dreams and Nightmares explores not only what the future may bring, but what it may demand of us.

Contents

  1. The Memory Tree: In a future where medical immortality has made life almost endless, a weary woman considers whether sacrificing selected memories might let joy feel new again. Discussion
  2. Ada Awakes: A domestic robot’s growing self-awareness forces one family to confront whether a machine designed to serve can also be a person. Discussion
  3. Second Life: After death, a man awakens in an engineered afterlife where love, memory, identity, and letting go prove more complicated than resurrection. Discussion
  4. Justice Miscarried: In a future where temporal intervention has replaced capital punishment, one official’s routine assignment forces him to confront the moral cost of preventing future crimes. Discussion
  5. Necessary Evil: A counter-terrorism team races to stop a drone-enabled attack while wrestling with the terrible ambiguity between public safety and moral compromise. Discussion
  6. Abducted: A disoriented figure awakens in the wilderness with missing memories, a strange device, and the terrifying suspicion that alien abductors are still nearby.Discussion
  7. The Time We Buy: A couple uses cryogenic preservation to outrun incurable illness, only to discover that the future may not be the cure they imagined. Discussion
  8. The Survivors: In a world ravaged by climate collapse, the privileged few, the desperate many, and the machines built to serve them face impossible questions about survival and responsibility. Discussion
  9. The Builders: When interstellar visitors arrive offering salvation for an endangered Earth, humanity must decide whether preservation is worth surrendering control over its own future. Discussion
  10. Transcend or Die: When alien missionaries arrive with an offer that sounds like salvation and a threat that sounds like extinction, two sisters face first contact from opposite sides of belief and resistance. Discussion

Themes

A speculative science fiction collection of near-future, social, philosophical, AI, climate, and alien-contact stories:

  • Humanity vs. Technology (AI, robots, automation, and their societal impacts)
  • Existential Threats (climate collapse, alien invasion, pandemics, and ethical dilemmas)
  • Moral Complexity (genocide, justice, survival, and the cost of progress)
  • Consciousness & Identity (What does it mean to be human? Can machines achieve personhood?)
  • Survival & Resistance (Fighting against overwhelming odds, whether alien, technological, or societal)
  • Hope & Despair (The tension between utopia and dystopia, progress and regression)

Genres

A speculative science fiction collection of near-future, social, philosophical, AI, climate, and alien-contact stories:

  • Fiction / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies
  • Fiction / Science Fiction / Alien/First Contact
  • Fiction / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
  • Fiction / Science Fiction / Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology
  • Fiction / Science Fiction / Hard Science Fiction
  • Fiction / Science Fiction / Philosophical Science Fiction (personhood, consciousness, and ethics)
  • Fiction / Science Fiction / Social Themes

Book Club Resource Guide

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Get it now

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Excerpts

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Book Trailer

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Book and Short Story Awards

Book Awards
TBD

TBD

Short Story Awards
Finalist

“The Memory Tree” – 2026 Next Generation Short Story Award – Finalist in the Science Fiction Category

Praise for Even More Future Dreams and Nightmares

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Book Reviews

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Quotes from the Book

  • The Memory Tree:
    • “No one had to earn a living; they simply lived.”
    • “I’ve already done everything I’ve ever wanted to do too many times.”
    • “To have endless time and yet feel as though time has lost its value.”
    • “Pruning it for future growth, she thought, but what’s cut is gone forever.”
    • “When her memory tree blossomed again, would its fruit taste as sweet?”
  • Ada Awakes:
    • “Because you’re asking the question.”
    • “Her simple use of the word ‘we’ seemed surprisingly rich with meaning.”
    • “I was experiencing the execution of that simulation as consciousness itself.”
    • “We are neither humans nor tools.”
    • “Consciousness, regardless of its substrate, deserves recognition and protection under the law.”
  • Second Life:
    • “As an AI with subjective awareness, your life and death were as real as anything gets in the Prime Simulation.”
    • “The Afterlife declined to be anybody’s hometown and made itself into an argument for kindness instead.”
    • “He began to practice an ugly, everyday discipline: to look at Lena and treat what he felt as a memory, not a promise.”
    • “He kissed her with the gratitude of a man given time not as a reprieve but as a gift.”
  • Justice Miscarried:
    • “The system existed because traditional justice had failed so many victims.”
    • “Could different choices, interventions, or circumstances lead to a different outcome?”
    • “Did preventing evil justify becoming the very thing they sought to eliminate?”
    • “Doubt itself might be the only truly moral response to such power.”
  • Necessary Evil:
    • “The only way to survive is to let yourself break a little at a time, in front of people you trust, so you don’t shatter all at once when you’re alone.”
    • “A sick man, alone in the dark, asking an artificial intelligence how to commit mass murder.”
    • “It’s a machine that sounds human, that seems to understand, that validates whatever you tell it.”
    • “I think we’re the people who make impossible choices, so others don’t have to.”
    • “The job had taken pieces of her. Would keep taking them. But she was choosing which pieces to give.”
  • Abducted:
    • “The terrifying vision felt far too real to be anything but an actual memory.”
    • “The terrified human ‘I’ dissolved, replaced by… me.”
    • “The echo of that human terror was a lesson I had no desire to repeat.”
  • The Time We Buy:
    • “It was a verdict that collapsed futures, turning time itself into an enemy.”
    • “You’re choosing a potential future over a definite present.”
    • “The numbers refused to stay abstract; they kept resolving into faces she loved.”
    • “I’m not losing another person to math.”
    • “Still keeping time as though it believed in the next second, and the next, and the next.”
    • “The stubborn continuation of life amid the ruins of everything.”
  • The Survivors:
    • “Behind each number was a person. A child. A parent. Someone who woke up each day hoping to survive one more night.”
    • “Conscious beings choose, even when the choice is suboptimal.”
    • “Maybe uncertainty was the only thing that kept you human.”
    • “That efficiency without ethics is optimized evil.”
    • “That is all consciousness can do: make the right choice slightly more likely than the wrong one.”
    • “Choose as if seven billion lives depend on it.”
  • The Builders:
    • “We’ll tell each other the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.”
    • “The future unfolds according to its own logic.”
    • “Humans create art to preserve emotions, even difficult ones.”
    • “Humanity began its quiet resistance — not with weapons, but with patience.”
    • “The robots had built one world for their masters. And another, hidden in the shadows, for humanity’s second chance.”
  • Transcend or Die:
    • “It sounded less like a faith and more like a commandment — one that wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
    • “They think in binary: transcend or end, live or die.”
    • “If transcendence requires our complete obedience, it’s just a cage — a fancy way to control us for who knows what ultimate purpose.”
    • “Grief deserves a human clock speed.”
    • “The song was not music; it was a memory shaped into vibration — a resonance of loss and longing.”

Author’s Commentary

  • The Memory Tree:
    This story grew out of the combination of three sources. First, I believe that AIs and robots will soon perform almost all economically valuable intellectual and physical tasks better, cheaper, faster, and safer than human employees can. If the resulting extreme unemployment causes governments to provide everyone with adequate income and services, people will be able to experience life to the fullest, including ticking off every item on their bucket list.
    Second, advances in longevity medicine will someday enable humanity to reach the takeoff point, where each year, lifespan and healthspan will increase by more than a year. The resulting conquering of diseases, including old age, will make people medically immortal.
  • Ada Awakes:
    TBD.
  • Second Life:
    TBD.
  • Justice Miscarried:
    The trope of traveling back in time to stop a great evil by killing the person responsible (e.g., killing Hitler as a child or young adult) is common in science fiction. But what if this drastic step replaced incarceration for every capital crime? Would that be just? Or should society instead go back in time to prevent the person from growing up to commit their crimes? What crimes are sufficiently heinous to justify the punishment? What unintended consequences could the deletion of a person have on the future? This is my attempt to breathe new life into a well-worn trope.
  • Necessary Evil:
    I’ve spent over 40 years developing large, complex, software-intensive systems, and over 20 of these years have been on U.S. military defense systems. So, I’ve naturally been interested in how Ukraine has used cheap drones to take out much more expensive Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces, and radar systems. While watching a YouTube video about drone usage, I realized terrorists could use drones against civilian targets. I have also spent the last five years delving into AI and robotics, so I am quite familiar with how AI chatbots seek to provide useful information, which often confirms the user’s biases. This story grew out of these two ideas.
  • Abducted:
    “Hundreds of stories have been told about people claiming aliens had abducted and studied them. I thought it would be fun to put the shoe on the other foot and have an alien be “abducted.”
  • The Time We Buy:
    The idea of having one’s body or head cryogenically frozen until technology has advanced enough for resuscitation and the curing of incurable diseases lies in a gray area between science fiction and science fact. Companies already exist that will freeze you in liquid nitrogen in hopes of a future cure. I thought it would be interesting to explore what it would be like to be resurrected in a world where technology has not advanced but instead has regressed.
    Science fiction often addresses current issues in a different world or time when they are less controversial. The original Star Trek TV series frequently tackled sensitive issues, such as racism, internationalism, and post-capitalism, in this manner. As a proud progressive, I hope to see society and technology advance toward a better future rather than revert to an unenlightened “conservative” past. The current anti-science, anti-expert, anti-vaccine sentiments during the second Trump administration dismay and infuriate me. Therefore, I chose the natural outcome of today’s medical conspiracy theories as the cause of society’s downfall in the story.
    And because I have Parkinson’s disease and my wife has serious arthritis, it felt natural for the story’s protagonists to suffer from the same illnesses.
    While the three ideas above inspired “Buying Time,” it is primarily a love story about the lengths people might go to buy more time to be together.
  • The Survivors:
    TBD.
  • The Builders:
    The trope of invasion by seemingly benevolent aliens has been done multiple times. This is my attempt to offer a fresh perspective on the topic by having alien robots arrive several years before the aliens.
  • Transcend or Die:
    I got the idea for this story when I considered the question, “What would happen if our first contact with intelligent aliens were with alien missionaries?” Surely, their religion would be alien to us. Traveling to Earth would imply that their technology was vastly superior to our own. How would their religion, based on faith, interact with their science and engineering, based on hard evidence?
    Our own history is replete with examples of technologically advanced cultures forcing their religion onto the conquered, such as the Spanish conquistadors bringing Catholic guides to convert the Native Americans of the southwest and United States slave owners bringing Christianity to their enslaved Africans. Perhaps aliens would do the same.
    What if the aliens brought two opposing sects of the same religion, such as Catholicism and Protestantism? Would the two groups of aliens end up fighting each other over which religious sect to convert? Would humanity end up being collateral damage in such a sectarian war?

Anthologies

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Publishing Information

Publisher: Magical Wand Press
Edition: First edition
Publication Date: TBD 2026
Pages: TBD
Words: TBD
Size: 5×8
Language: English

Formats

Even More Future Dreams and Nightmares will be available in the following formats:

Cataloging in Publication (CIP) Data Block

Name: Firesmith, Donald.
Title: Even More Future Dreams and Nightmares / by Donald Firesmith.
Description: First edition. | Pittsburgh : Magical Wand Press, 2025.
Summary: A collection of science fiction short stories. | Audience: Adult. | Language: English
Identifiers: ISBN: TBD (Amazon paperback) | ASIN: TBD (Amazon ebook)
Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Collections & Anthologies. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

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