Fiction | The Verge

Instagram turns 20 on this day in 2030

2020-10-06T10:50:07-04:00

[Transcript for 2D legacy devices]

[10/6/2030]

-LEFT EYE / RIGHT EYE: /impose/ INSTAGRAM TOWER

[VOICEOVER]

INSTAGRAM, the little photo filtering app that's become the biggest shopping and communications platform in the world, turned TWENTY YEARS OLD today.

-RIGHT EYE / interspersed archival photos of Instagram app CIRCA 2015, CIRCA 2014, CIRCA 2012

The service has TRANSFORMED SIGNIFICANTLY over the past decade, growing from a little social app into a ubiquitous platform that runs much of our daily lives - including the AUGMENTED VIDEO PLATFORM you're probably using to watch this.

That success recently made it the first $10 TRILLION CO …

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Imagine a world without YouTube

2020-02-28T10:47:12-05:00

Fifteen years ago this month, one of the most important web domains in history was registered: youtube.com. Today's teenagers have never known an internet that couldn't host as much video as they want for free, server costs be damned. YouTube has helped elect politicians, create entire industries, and taught millions of people how to use eyeliner. It's not a stretch to say it shaped the internet as we know it.

But what if YouTube had failed? Would we have missed out on decades of cultural phenomena and innovative ideas? Would we have avoided a wave of dystopian propaganda and misinformation? Or would the internet have simply spiraled into n …

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A strange interstellar object is coming to Earth in this excerpt from The Last Astronaut

2019-07-07T12:00:00-04:00

David Wellington is known for his wide-ranging catalog of stories, such as his Monsters, Vampires, Werewolves, and Plague novels, and branched into space opera a couple of years ago with his The Silence trilogy (Forsaken Skies, Forgotten Worlds, and Forbidden Suns), which he wrote under the name D. Nolan Clark. Later this month, he'll release his latest science fiction thriller, The Last Astronaut.

In it, astronaut Sally Jansen has been working to come to grips with a Mars mission that went disastrously wrong, and NASA ended its crewed missions into space. But while she's trying to move on, scientists detect an object designated 2I/2044 D1 …

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A starfighter pilot awakens in an unwelcome future in this excerpt from Velocity Weapon

2019-06-11T11:40:13-04:00

In her latest novel, Velocity Weapon, Megan E. O'Keefe takes up the story of a military pilot named Sergeant Sandra Greeve who is fighting in an interstellar war in the distant future and is shot down during a battle. When she wakes up, she discovers that she was rescued by an autonomous spaceship called The Light of Berossus (which calls itself Bero), and has been placed in suspended animation for two centuries. Everything she fought for was for naught; humanity essentially wiped itself out in the war.

O'Keefe jumps between timelines, flashing back to Sandra's brother, Biran, who learns that his sister was supposedly killed in battle. But …

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Dive into a new sci-fi anthology set in the world’s oceans

2019-06-08T11:00:00-04:00

Current Futures, a new sci-fi anthology of short stories, was published online this week in honor of World Oceans Day, taking readers deep into fantastic (and wet) futures.

Genetic editing, holograms, and underwater cities each make appearances in the 18 stories and 18 accompanying illustrations. The stories were edited by sci-fi author Ann VanderMeer, and come from authors all over the world. One author, Lauren Beukes, even wrote her story, "Her Seal Skin Coat" while in Antarctica.

The anthology was sponsored by the XPrize Foundation, a group that organizes massive competitions focused on pushing technology forward in different fields, i …

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Love in the time of video games and Discord

2019-03-24T11:00:00-04:00

Ming paces the store floor, careful to avoid eye contact with any shoppers. He rustles through his too-tight jean pockets for his vape pen. Minutes go by, until a whole hour has passed. He moves to check his Android smartwatch for what must be the hundredth time, but thinks better of it and checks his phone instead, in case the radio silence he's experiencing is due to his messages not syncing.

The very last message he sent Avery was: will u go out with me? He had been cute about it, sending her a cheesy meme attached to it, which was also a backup plan of sorts: if things went wrong, he could say it had all been a joke.

But this silence i …

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Xiaomi plans to triple its number of European stores by the end of the year

2019-02-26T08:22:45-05:00

Xiaomi’s Mi 9, out this week in Europe for 449 euros. | Credit: Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Chinese phone makers have yet to make significant inroads in the US market, but that doesn't seem to bother them much - they're too busy focusing on Europe instead.

The latest example of this shift in attention is Xiaomi's announcement that it plans to triple its European store count by the end of the year. CNBC reports that the firm wants to go from fewer than 50 stores at the end of 2018 to more than 150 by the end of the 2019. "It's a big big target for us," Xiaomi's senior vice president, Wang Xiang, said.

It's also part of an established trend. Chinese brands like Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus are grabbing more and more of t …

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Katherine Cross on moderating online gaming communities and artificial intelligence

2019-02-13T10:00:00-05:00

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In Katherine Cross' short story "Machine of Loving Grace" - the final installment in our Better Worlds anthology - Alexandra and Phoebe must deal with their creation Ami, an artificial intelligence that was designed to moderate online communities, as it fights fire with fire.

Cross is a sociologist and a gaming and social critic who is working on her PhD at University of Washington Information School, specializing in the study of gender and online harassment. Her work has appeared in The Establishment, The Guardian, Gamasutra, Time magazine, and The Verge.

The Verge spoke with Cross about how artificial intelligence requires empathy and th …

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Machine of Loving Grace

2019-02-13T10:00:00-05:00

"What the hell was that, Phoebe? You know we had to sign stuff that specifically said 'no swearing and no violent threats,' lest we freak out all three children under the age of five at this fucking conference. Can you tell I have a lot of very antisocial feelings about Google Next?"

Once Alexandra Rivera got going, there was no stopping her. Phoebe was, in a way, relieved to see that her boss was considerably more stressed out by this conference than she was. "Look, all Ami did was tell off a World of Orc-craft guild for making rape jokes in trade chat. We can spin the message as a test of the natural language system."

"She did it while t …

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Better Worlds: a science fiction project about hope

2019-02-13T10:00:00-05:00

Contemporary science fiction often feels fixated on a sort of pessimism that peers into the world of tomorrow and sees the apocalypse looming more often than not. At a time when simply reading the news is an exercise in exhaustion, anxiety, and fear, it's no surprise that so many of our tales about the future are dark amplifications of the greatest terrors of the present. But now more than ever, we also need the reverse: stories that inspire hope.

That's why, starting on January 14th, we'll be publishing Better Worlds: 10 original fiction stories, five animated adaptations, and five audio adaptations by a diverse roster of science fi …

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