Joey Eschrich

Managing Editor, Center for Science and the Imagination; Assistant Director, Future Tense, Arizona State University

[joeyeschrich]

The Climate Action Almanac brings together top science fiction authors with researchers, artists, scientists, and advocates from around the world to share visions of positive climate futures. These works of fiction, nonfiction, and art chart pathways toward a vibrant, decarbonized future. They are grounded in real science and honor local particularities, insisting upon equity and justice and imagining efforts that could be scaled out for coordinated global change.

The Almanac is presented by the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, in partnership with the MIT Press, and supported by a grant from the ClimateWorks Foundation. The book is edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, with illustrations by João Queiroz. It features fiction by Vandana Singh, Libia Brenda, Hannah Onoguwe, and Gu Shi.

[joeyeschrich]

The 2000s Video Game With an Unexpected Lesson for Today’s Transportation Debates

Plus, stories from the recent past of Future Tense.

A piece for Slate's Future Tense channel about the Mass Effect trilogy and the social, cultural, and political implications of transportation technologies.

[joeyeschrich]

Why We Need Stories of Climate Optimism

Meeting the challenges of climate change will require imagination at every level, from local communities to global institutions.

A piece with Ed Finn for New America's "The Thread" on the urgency of hopeful climate storytelling.

[joeyeschrich]

The 1990s MTV Cartoon With a Surprisingly Modern Take on Surveillance

Peter Chung’s Æon Flux presents a fresh alternative to black-and-white moralizing.

A piece for Slate's Future Tense channel about surveillance aesthetics in the 1990s MTV animated series Æon Flux.

[joeyeschrich]

Essay Jams and Collaborative Writing as a Community Event

How does the essay jam both capture productive tensions in community-led, community-responsive publishing, and suggest future directions for

A short essay I wrote with Zoyander Street for "Community-led Editorial Management," a special issue of the journal Commonplace, focusing on essay jams and game jams as models for editorial work and collaborative publishing.

[joeyeschrich]

Climate Nihilism—and Hope—Is Coming From the Strangest Places in Sci-Fi

Plus, stories from the recent past of Future Tense.

A piece for Slate's Future Tense channel about how science fiction is spinning out stories of nihilism and stubborn hopefulness in the face of the climate crisis.

[joeyeschrich]

An interview on Solar Futures, a podcast presented by Solarpunk Magazine, with me and my coeditor Clark A. Miller about our books The Weight of Light and Cities of Light.

[joeyeschrich]

Imaginary Papers - Center for Science and the Imagination

Imaginary Papers is a quarterly newsletter from the Center for Science and the Imagination, focused on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and the unplumbed depths of the imagination. Each issue

Imaginary Papers is a quarterly newsletter from the Center for Science and the Imagination, focused on science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and the unplumbed depths of the imagination. Each issue features brief, incisive pieces of writing from a diverse array of contributors, from scholars and journalists to cultural critics, designers, technologists, poets, and more. 

[joeyeschrich]

CSI Skill Tree is a series from the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University that examines and celebrates how video games envision ...

Watch CSI Skill Tree, a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories. Our guests include game developers, scholars, critics and journalists, science fiction authors, and other interesting folks working at the intersection of technological change and story craft.

[joeyeschrich]

Everything Change, Volume III, a collection of short stories by writers from around the world, exploring the climate crisis and how human responses to it will shape the futures we will inhabit. This free digital anthology features stories in styles ranging from science fiction and fabulism to literary fiction, weird fiction, and action-thriller, all drawn from the 2020 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest.

The contest and anthology are presented by the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at Arizona State University, a partnership of the Center for Science and the Imagination and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. Generous support was provided by Ingka Group.

[joeyeschrich]

Cities of Light, a collection of science fiction stories, art, and essays exploring how the transition to solar energy will transform our cities and catalyze revolutions in culture and governance. Created in collaboration with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I coedited this collection with energy scholar Clark A. Miller; it’s free to download in a variety of digital formats.

[joeyeschrich]

A symposium in SFRA Review, an open-access journal published by the Science Fiction Research Association, focused on our Us in Flux project, exploring collaborative imagination, community, and resilience. The symposium features fiction from Us in Flux, essays from scholars of speculative fiction, an essay by fiction author, physicist, and climate researcher Vandana Singh, and concluding reflections from Ed Finn, director of the Center for Science and the Imagination.

[joeyeschrich]

The fifth issue of our Imaginary Papers newsletter, featuring Emma Kostopolus writing about Mass Effect 3, Malik Toms writing about The Brother from Another Planet, and a feature on the collection Scotland in Space. To receive future issues, subscribe here.

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Watch the fifth episode of our CSI Skill Tree series on video games, worldbuilding, and futures, featuring historian, city planner, and Hugo Award-winning novelist Arkady Martine and global science fiction and games scholar Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay discussing the classic science fiction strategy game Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.

[joeyeschrich]

Check out the fourth episode of our CSI Skill Tree series on video games, worldbuilding, and futures, featuring science fiction novelist and attorney Deji Bryce Olukotun discussing representations of Africa and Africans in video games, through the lens of 80 Days, Time magazine’s game of the year in 2014.

[joeyeschrich]

The Imagination Desk, a podcast series featuring interviews with authors, scholars, scientists, and technologists about what inspires them and how they define and use imagination in their work.

Our guests have included television producer Anne Cofell Saunders, the band YACHT, science fiction and fantasy writer Paolo Bacigalupi, literacy scholar Jonathan Alexander, game designer and novelist Matt Derby, Afrofuturist filmmaker, theorist, and dancer Ytasha Womack, and transmedia designer Maureen McHugh.

[joeyeschrich]

The fourth issue of our Imaginary Papers newsletter, featuring Alvaro Zinos-Amaro writing about Strange Days at its 25th anniversary, Katherine Buse writing about SimEarth, and a feature on the astrobiology science fiction anthology Strangest of All. To receive future issues, subscribe here.