Following the mass extinction of most species, the animals that fill a zoo in a future Arctic metropolis are lab-made—with one exception: an aging lion. When the lion escapes in the middle of the city’s Christmas festivities, a complex hunt ensues.
An expert in environmental philosophy and wildlife recovery responds to Margrét Helgadóttir’s “A Lion Roars in Longyearbyen.”
Response
The AI boom means more demands on data centers—and running a data center requires complex technical infrastructure, vast environmental resources, and experienced human talent. In E. G. Condé’s story, a labyrinthine data center is in the middle of a massive outage. When the corporation that owns the center fails to diagnose the problem provoking the outage with its fancy technical systems, it’s forced to turn to human intuition to sniff out a more fundamental dilemma.
The energy demands of data centers—accelerated by artificial intelligence—are steering us toward disaster. Could biology help bring us back from the brink?
Response
Professor, medievalist, and writer Erin K. Wagner discusses “The Middle,” her August 2025 short story for Future Tense Fiction.
In Margrét Helgadóttir’s “Tunnel Fever,” an isolated roadside bar buried in a vast network of tunnels on the floor of the Arctic Ocean is staffed by a claustrophobic waitress who dreams of life above the surface. When a pair of outlaws tries to rob the bar, its patrons and employees are forced to work together […]
