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Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities - Hardcover

 
9781536236392: Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 153623639X ISBN 13: 9781536236392
Verlag: Mit Kids Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In a thrilling follow-up to Tasting Light, ten best-selling and award-winning masters of the form use the possible—and the premise of hope—to explore how science and technology can reshape our world and defy assumptions.

At once a collection of hard science fiction for curious middle-graders and an antidote to despair in the face of dystopian uncertainty, these ten horizon-bending stories may seem unreal, but all follow the rules of physics and biology as we understand them today. These tales of space junk, multiverse navigation, an asteroid named Doomsday, and bees and marmots in space pulse with honesty and optimism. Whether home is a planet, a moon, a space station, or a fleet starship, relatable protagonists of different genders, classes, nationalities, ethnicities, and orientations face challenges—some harrowing, some hilarious—true to their moment in time and space. Brisk plots, resonant themes, and scientific rigor define these forward-facing stories by leading middle-grade authors. Taken together, the tales champion youth agency through characters who approach science in adventurous ways, underscoring that we are all, indeed, made of the same luminous stuff.

With stories by:
William Alexander * A. R. Capetta * Maddi Gonzalez * Carlos Hernandez * Kekla Magoon * Jenn Reese * David Robertson * Wade Roush * Eliot Schrefer * Fran Wilde

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Alexander is a New York Times best-selling author of unrealisms for middle-grade readers and a contributor to Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions. His novel Goblin Secrets received the National Book Award, and his novel Ambassador won the Eleanor Cameron Award for excellence in juvenile science fiction and was a finalist for the International Latino Book Award. He served for three years as the faculty chair of the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. He lives in Vermont.

Wade Roush is a technology journalist and audio producer who focuses on how science and technology are changing our lives and what we can do as individuals to steer that process. He is the host of the podcast Soonish and the editor of the hard sci-fi anthology Twelve Tomorrows, published by MIT Press, and a co-editor with A. R. Capetta of Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions. He holds a PhD from MIT in the history of technology and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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PREFACE

The legendary planetary scientist Carl Sagan noted in Cosmos that the heavier elements in our bodies—nitrogen, carbon, calcium, iron—are pure starstuff, made in the interiors of imploding stars. In that sense, the periodic table of elements is both perfectly ordinary and mythically huge. The building blocks of your own teeth were forged in the heart of a dying star. So were the elements of apples that those teeth bite into. You can taste a supernova.
Science fiction blends vast ideas with everyday things—and both the vast and the everyday are transformed when they mix together.
The stories in this hard science fiction collection may seem wildly unreal compared to everyday life in the 2020s, but all of them follow the rules of physics and biology—at least as far as we currently understand those rules. Our sense of the universe and how it works is constantly evolving to fit the new discoveries we make. These stories explore how science and technology change our world and challenge our assumptions.
Changes and challenges are sometimes terrifying. Plenty of recent science fiction offers a steady stream of climate despair, collapsing societies, postapocalyptic combat, and radioactive kaiju. Starstuff is different. These stories are hopeful vaccines against a pandemic of dystopian expectations.
The world is changing, and not all of those changes are awful. Our understanding of the world will also change. New possibilities will always explode from the collapse of worldviews that no longer fit, just as calcium and carbon spread through the universe after stars go nova. The ten stories in this book are part of that expanding wave of possibility. They feature kids of different classes, genders, nationalities, ethnicities, and orientations who call out problems, find solutions, and help transform the planets, moons, space stations, and fleets of starships where they live.
All of us are made of the same extraordinary stuff.

- - - - - - - - - -

To-Do List for the Apocalypse
Jenn Reese


There’s an asteroid headed straight for Earth, on a head-on collision course, and yet my parents still decided to get a divorce.
At least with the asteroid, the end of the world will come pretty quick. Kaplow! Boom! I like that idea better than the slow, ongoing apocalypse I’m living through now.
Today is October 13, 2032, aka “moving day.” I’ve been dreading it for months, and it’s finally here. Mom is shoving the last box into the back of the car. It won’t fit. Dad is standing in the shade of the garage, watching, his arms crossed, and calling out suggestions. Mom hated when he did this, even when things were good. Now I watch her eyes narrow into slits and her nose flare. If Dad keeps this up, she’ll start breathing fire. I can’t blame her.
I grab my multi-tool and pull out the knife. “Here, Mom. We can open the box and tuck the stuff into the gaps.”
Mom looks at me and the flames in her eyes cool to embers. “Good idea, River.” She holds the box, and I slice the tape. Together, we find spots for spatulas and sauté pans and a beat-up kettle that Mom needs for her morning tea. It has to be that kettle. No other kettle will do. I’ve tried explaining that hot water is hot water no matter how you make it, but Mom is stubborn. I end up wedging it into the footwell in the passenger seat. Me and that kettle are going to be best friends by the time we get to California.
“You could have fit the box if you rearranged the ones in the back seat,” Dad says, and this time even I glare at him. His eyes are red, and he doesn’t want us to go, but Mom’s new job starts in January. I’m the one who should be crying. I’m leaving all my friends, all my summer camps and clubs, my entire life.
Which is pointless because of the asteroid. Because everything is about to change.
TO-DO LIST
1. Invent a time machine.
2.
Go back six months and stop Dad from
cheating on Mom.
The car is packed. Dad pulls me aside and hands me a massive book. I stare at the cover and see the word atlas.
“It’s got every road, so we can always find each other,” he says.
I let him hug me, but all I’m really thinking about is where this book is going to fit in our overstuffed car. Who gives people books when they’re about to road-trip across the country? Who uses books to navigate in a world with universal, free Wi-Fi and up-to-date GPS systems in every car?
Dad, that’s who.
I climb into the passenger seat with the atlas. Mom raises an eyebrow, and I roll my eyes.
“We can ditch the tea kettle if you want to stow that by your feet,” she says.
“No way.” Me and the tea kettle are already ride or die.
We stop at a charging station in Potts Grove, Pennsyl-vania, to get road trip slushies and stretch our legs. I dump Dad’s atlas in a recycling bin, then notice Mom watching me. She doesn’t say a single word as I get back in the car.
“Your turn to pick the playlist,” she says.
“I picked last time.”
She shrugs. “So pick again.”

The trees in Pennsylvania have stopped producing chlorophyll and are showing off their carotenoids, a fact that I relay to Mom with great relish.
Mom laughs. “You’re going to wow ’em in California, kid.”
I look out the window and watch the red and orange and yellow trees speed by. Maybe the trees aren’t showing off. Maybe they’re getting ready for the asteroid. Maybe when it hits, everything will be on fire, not just the trees.
“Maybe we won’t make it to California,” I say.
She doesn’t realize it’s wishful thinking on my part. She says, “Don’t worry. There are some very smart people working on the asteroid. They’ll find something else to try. I have faith.”
When Mom says she has faith, she doesn’t mean in a “higher power”—she means that she believes in science, and in humanity. She teaches psychology and she spends her free time doing “citizen science,” which is when regular people without training get to help scientists with big projects. Whenever a volunteer opportunity takes her to an observatory, she calls it “going to church.” I think I know what she means. My friends and I went to a robotics conference at Princeton once and it was so cool that I thought my head was going to explode. Totally worth it if it had.
Me and my friends used to do that sort of thing whenever we could, back when my parents were still together and I was on the robotics team and lived in New Jersey and the world wasn’t about to end.
Pennsylvania becomes Ohio, then Ohio blends into Indiana and Illinois and Iowa. Mom and I don’t talk about Dad. I can tell she’s trying to cheer me up, because she asks me all about my latest robot and my Dungeons & Dragons characters and my video game progress. I wonder if I’ll finish any of those games. My friends and I can play online, but it won’t be the same.
When I get tired of talking, we listen to the news. Everyone listens to the news now. That’s what happens when the world is about to end.

There are two clusters of asteroids called Trojans orbiting the sun out by Jupiter, one group racing ahead of the planet and the other group lagging behind. The Lucy probe, a little piano-size robot with big solar panel ears, launched in 2021 and grabbed data from four asteroids in the lead group. Then Lucy looped around Earth for a speed boost and is now headed for the Trojan called Patroclus in the trailing cluster.
But out there between Earth and Patroclus, Lucy spotted something strange: an asteroid heading...

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Verlag
Mit Kids Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
153623639X
ISBN 13 
9781536236392
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
275
Herausgeber
Alexander William, Roush Wade
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Verantwortliche Person
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