It’s official. The Martians have landed at Horsell Common, which is somewhere near Woking (that’s in New Jersey, if you’re listening to the radio). Gigantic alien spaceships have appeared over all the major cities of the Earth. Spock can’t believe his ears as ‘Klaatu Barada Nikto’ thunders over the intergalactic subaetheric hyper-relay. And 237,000 lightly fried eggs have materialized on the famine-ravaged planet of Pogril.

Amid all this cosmic brouhaha you’d be forgiven for not noticing that Futures From Nature, an anthology of the best of the SF published in _Nature_’s award-winning Futures series, comes out this November from Tor. Order a load for Christmas now!

The anthology contains a hundred (yes, a hundred) bite-sized nuggets of future shock. The authorship is as varied as you can imagine.

We have some of the truly venerable bugblatter beasts of SF, alongside some of the hottest, spiciest, raciest writers in the field. We have writers of whom you’ve probably never heard (but should have done) and writers who are trying their hand at fiction for the very first time.

Therefore I am not worthy to mention, for example, yea, even simultaneously and in the same sentence, that Futures from Nature contains gems by Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl, Joe Haldeman, Greg Bear, Vonda McIntyre, Gregory Benford, Michael Moorcock, Dan Simmons, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, Brian Aldiss, Bruce Sterling, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Jack McDevitt, Peter F. Hamilton, Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds, Justina Robson, Ken MacLeod, Scarlett Thomas, Nancy Kress, Ellen Klages, Donna McMahon, Barrington Bayley, Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, Larissa Lai, Robert Charles Wilson, Tom Holt, Warren Ellis, Rudy Rucker, Jeff Crook, Robert Metzger, Joan Slonczewski, Hiromi Goto and … oooh, loads more.

And as I am the editor, I get to write two stories — one completely new and unpublished anywhere.

It’s been a long journey, lately carried out at near lightspeed (I know this as I am correcting the page proofs). But it’s all very exciting. Strap yourself in for the countdown.