Terraform, Brian Merchant
Terraform, Brian Merchant
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
Club: $11.47

Synopsis

An anthology of near future science fiction from VICE’s acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination, Terraform―in print for the first time.Terraform hones the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future we’re hurtling toward, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next.Section by section―Watch/Worlds/Burn―the book takes on surveillance, artificial intelligence, and climate collapse. With a potent roster of established names and rising talents―from Bruce Sterling, Ellen Ullman, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, and Omar El Akkad, to E. Lily Yu, Elvia Wilk, Fernando Flores, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Gus Moreno―it confronts the issues that orbit our everyday existence, and takes them to unsettling dimensions.

About Brian Merchant

Brian Merchant is a writer and editor focusing on culture and technology, living in Los Angeles. He is the author of the forthcoming book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech and the national bestseller The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.

About Claire L. Evans

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture. She is the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet and the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an adviser to graduate design students at ArtCenter College of Design.

About Bahni Turpin

Bahni Turpin is an ensemble member of the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles. She has guest starred in many television series, including NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Six Feet Under, Cold Case, What About Brian, and The Comeback. Her film credits include Brokedown Palace, Crossroads, and Daughters of The Dust. Ms. Turpin won the Odyssey Award for The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. She has also received many AudioFile Earphones Awards for her unforgettable narration, including one for Precious by Sapphire, and for the National Book Award finalist and Oprah Book Club Pick The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. She's also a member of the cast recording of The Help, which won numerous awards.

About Eunice Wong

Eunice Wong is a classically trained actor who works in professional theatres across the United States and in New York City, as well as having appeared on HBO, NBC, ABC, Comedy Central, and in various independent films..

About Chelsea Stephens

Chelsea Stephens has a longtime love and appreciation for the performing arts, with experience in on-stage acting, singing, and voice-over. Her love for reading books and the pursuit of the story led her to narration. She enjoys unfolding characters and bringing listeners into new worlds. Chelsea is an experienced voice actor with a talent for mystery, sci-fi, and YA novels. She's a mom to a gaggle of young ones living in the Midwest with her lumber sexual husband.

About Marisa Calin

Marisa Calin is an actress, novelist, and multiple Earphones Award–winning narrator born in England and educated in New York at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts. An artist with a flair for everything literary, she has written a young adult novel, You & Me, which received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews.

About Mark Bramhall

Mark Bramhall has performed off-Broadway, at venues nationwide, and extensively in film and television. He holds numerous honors for his narrations and has repeatedly been featured among AudioFile Magazine’s best readers of the year.

About Graham Halstead

Graham Halstead is a professionally trained actor and voice artist, born and raised in Virginia and now living and working in Brooklyn, New York City. As an actor, Graham has worked internationally in Edinburgh, Scotland, and London, England, as well as back home at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His voice is youthful, easy-flowing, and flexible, and lends itself to many different types of storytelling. He can be heard on TV and radio voicing spots for Airborne and Allegra.

About Meghan Kelly

Meghan Kelly is an experienced narrator, actress, and musician who spent ten years working as a franchised talent agent before deciding to pursue her own performance aspirations. Since then, she has had the great pleasure of bringing a wide variety of characters to life. 

About Hillary Huber

Hillary Huber is a Los Angeles–based voice talent with hundreds of commercials and promos under her belt. She records books on a regular basis and has been nominated for several Audie Awards.

About Kyla Garcia

Kyla Garcia is an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator. She received her BFA in acting from Rutgers University. She has played Lady Macbeth at the Globe Theatre in London.

About Rasha Zamamiri

Rasha Zamamiri is an actress, a singer, and a voiceover artist who was born in the Middle East and raised all over the world. She has a vast knowledge of cultures, customs, and religions, which have helped her character portrayals on stage, on TV, and in the booth. She was also the first Muslim featured in a national commercial wearing the hijab, which was televised during the Super Bowl, Olympics, and multiple national events.

About Feodor Chin

Feodor Chin, an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an actor classically trained at the American Conservatory Theater and UCLA. His acting career includes numerous credits in film, television, theater, and voice-over.

About Stefan Rudnicki

Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and an award-winning narrator who has won several Audie Awards and been named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices. Stefan’s early singing career included choral and solo concerts at Carnegie Hall, Judson Hall, and Lincoln Center.

About Chris Henry Coffey

Chris Henry Coffey is a film and television actor known for his role in David Schwimmer’s film Trust. He has also had roles on Broadway, including the play Bronx Bombers. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.

About Cary Hite

Cary Hite is an experienced actor and audiobook narrator who has had the pleasure of working with a number of publishing houses. An Earphones award-winner, he currently resides in New York City.

About Tim Campbell

Tim Campbell is the Audie and AudioFile Earphones Award-winning voice of hundreds of audiobook titles in almost every literary genre.

About André Santana

André Santana has narrated across genres from space opera to young adult romance, and from literary fiction to epic fantasy. He is also in demand as an audiobook director and he’s always on a mission to fall in love with his books. andreonthemic.com

About Janina Edwards

Janina Edwards is a native of Chicago and a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts acting program. She excels at portraying authentic characters and voices of African Americans and other people of the African diaspora, plus other English-speaking cultures.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Angela on December 03, 2022

Actual Rating: 4.5/5 This collection was a delight to read and very consistent in quality for a short story anthology. Obviously like with any anthology there will be hits and misses but the fact that all of these short stories were less than 20 pages and I could easily read one a day for 10-15 min......more

Goodreads review by Alex on March 15, 2023

could not stand this book tbh......more

Goodreads review by Zade on June 14, 2023

This may be the first anthology I've ever read that doesn't have a single bad story, nor a single one that doesn't fit. Comprising a great many authors from a variety of backgrounds, it somehow manages to stay on topic throughout its 500+ pages, presenting a wealth of visions of where we are now and......more

Goodreads review by Michael on November 06, 2022

Terraform is Vice Media's speculative fiction arm, and these stories are internet age provocations, short, sharp, often intriguing. Divided into three sections, Watch on the panopticon, World with classic scifi alternative worlds, and Burn focusing on disaster, there are a lot of winners in this col......more

Goodreads review by Leah on February 22, 2025

impressive to create a book of short stories where every short story is extremely depressing but the book remains readable. the world is ending and i feel fine......more


Quotes

“Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn is through and through Luddite science fiction: critical, not cynical; perceptive, not preachy; imaginative, not derivative; but above all else, rooted in the idea that the world we’ve made is a world we can unmake.” Edward Ongweso Jr., cohost of This Machine Kills

“Be careful. These stories may burn you with their scalding visions of other worlds and alternate tomorrows.” Annalee Newitz, author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

“This is the kind of book we need now, a collection of stories bursting with visions, ideas, nightmares, and utopian plans, all in the aid of creating cognitive maps for navigating the very difficult future that is coming. When dread and joy combine, what is that? Excitement? Read this and see what you think.” Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author

“Someday a future intelligence will find this, washing up on shore or archived on a server farm deep underground or drifting as ones and zeros through space, and they’ll have a document of who we were, who we are, and who we imagined we might be. This anthology is filled with work from brilliant writers, new and familiar, and out of their anxieties come nightmares and dreams, an assortment of stories that is equal parts terrifying and entertaining.” Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author

“Read these short, biting, vibrant stories for their wit, inventiveness, and verve.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“This showcase of today’s leading imaginations offers enough vivid cautionary tales to make even the most optimistic tech utopian hesitate…While the tone throughout tends toward the bleak and searing, hope shines through.” Publishers Weekly