Future Rules and Rituals

Programmers who eliminate poverty (and wealth), a city that supports adults to find their optimal life paths, a society where people work for fulfilment rather than to fill their bellies and another where humans live under the supervision of benevolent robots. These four short stories, written between October 2024 and September 2025, all grapple with the relationship between individuals and society.

Societies are built out of structures that include institutions (like governments, courts and education systems), traditions and beliefs (like celebrations and faiths), rules and laws (both coded and unspoken), economic relations (who has access to resources and how they are distributed) and common practices (what we expect of each other and how we behave). We seldom think about these parts of society; they are just there in the background, until they start to irritate, to smart. Then, they loom large and monstrous.

But the building blocks of society are not fixed. We can change them. All four stories in this collection invite you to think about new ways to structure human societies. They are not recommendations, but prompts to think about what you would like the future to be like. This is optimistic future fiction, where we create better worlds.