James Patrick Kelly's Strangeways Number 3 — James Patrick Kelly

Hugo and Nebula award winning writer James Patrick Kelly returns with a guided tour of the end of the world as we know it. Having a hard time keeping up with the sweeping changes in technology and culture? Wondering where it’s all going to? So have many futurists and science fiction writers. In fact, some have predicted that a techno-cultural Singularity is imminent, a moment in the not-too-distant future when the accelerating rate of change opens onto a post-human future. Here are two stories of the coming Singularity. In “The Edge of Nowhere” survivors of a Singularity find themselves trapped in a strange village where nothing seems real, not even themselves. And in “Barry Westphall Crashes the Singularity” a guy steps out of a bar and into the future because a world-spanning artificial intelligence is prying into his sex life. All this plus an essay speculating on the likelihood that our kids will be software when they grow up are featured in Strangeways Number Three.