"Printcrime" is the short-short from Nature, and it envisions in just a few pages an Orwellian future where possession of 3-D "printers" or fabricators is a crime against trademarked products and cause for jail time. The story's protagonist eventually abandons personal profit for societal liberation.

Post-apocalyptic stories such as the recent series of novels by S.M. Stirling often revel in a return to a pretechnological milieu. But in "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," Doctorow's heroes, geeks one and all, fight to preserve the Internet in the face of multiple assaults on the infrastructure of civilization. Luckily busy in airtight rooms full of hardware when a lethal virus is unleashed, Systems Administrator Felix and his pals survive the horrible deaths of all their loved ones. Over the next few weeks they struggle to preserve online communications as both a tool and a model for rebuilding civilization. A compressed coda charts their mixed successes and failures over subsequent years.

Overweight and friendless, Anda is a bright British 12-year-old who lives to immerse herself in an online gamer's world similar to World of Warcraft. Hence "Anda's Game." Soon she's attained the rank of a fearsome female warrior, a member of the dreaded Farenheits. But when she's asked to undertake several virtual missions in exchange for real money, she's presented with an ethical dilemma: Her missions are impacting the lives of Third World sweatshop workers. Can she solve her problems before Mum and Da take her PC away?

"I, Robot," somewhat anomalously for Doctorow, does not leapfrog from our present world but inhabits a separate continuum, one where the West has hobbled itself by allowing a monopoly to manufacture all robots, as opposed to Eurasia, where diversity of robotics thrives. Arturo Arana-Goldberg is a cop devoted to enforcing the status quo. His wife, Natalie, is a robotics expert who has gone over to the Eurasian side. In the middle of this awkward relationship is a teenage daughter named Ada Trouble. Can she engineer a reunion between her parents, and on what strange terms?

In a thematically companionable story, "I, Row-Boat," we follow the fortunes of an AI embodied in an oceangoing pleasure ship. With humans ascended into the noosphere, where is a poor digital brain loyal to the principles of Asimov going to find guidance? Maybe from an intelligent coral reef?

Finally, "After the Siege" follows the harsh maturation of a young girl named Valentine. Living in a utopian renegade temporary autonomous zone, Valentine has the misfortune of being trapped in her city by the armies who seek to bring the city back to conformity. As the siege drags on for several years, Valentine undergoes a brutal education in the ways of power and helplessness, while never losing an inner light that will allow her to ultimately triumph in a surprising fashion.

The future of SF is right here, right now

Cory Doctorow gives away his vital writing secret right here in these pages, a guaranteed method for producing cutting-edge, engaged, supercharged SF. In his preface to "Anda's Game," he says, "The easiest way to write futuristic (or futurismic) science fiction is to predict, with rigor and absolute accuracy, the present day." Ah, but like the words of all oracles, his pronouncement has a cryptic, paradoxical air to it. What exactly can this mean?

Well, he's simply giving us the classical, core methodology of SF from its Golden Age, restated for post-modern times. Doctorow is just doing, after all, what Robert Heinlein did at his best: steeping himself in the culture of the present and then amping up what he registers as significant to a day-after-tomorrow condition. Sounds trivial, put that way, doesn't it? But the relative paucity of Heinleins and Doctorows on the market indicates it's not as easy as it looks. One has to canvass thoroughly the whole of scientific, artistic and sociological progress, distill the essences, and then find a plot and characters that can best embody the lessons to be conveyed. Knowing a lot about history and the human heart is essential as well. In other words, even before one begins the conventional task of storytelling, one already faces a full-time job of analysis and prognostication.

But Doctorow, like Heinlein, is up to the task. As these stories illustrate, he has a knack for identifying those seminal trends of our current landscape that will in all likelihood determine the shape of our future(s). Add in a recursive affection for past landmarks of SF (besides the Asimovian references, there's a lot of Clifford Simak in the "Row-Boat" piece), and a gentle empathy for the underdogs in such scenarios, and you get a winning narrative and ideational combination.

Doctorow's talents are probably at their current peak in "After the Siege." Reminiscent of Geoff Ryman's mournful humanism, and inspired by the real-life tribulations of the author's Russian grandmother during the seige of Leningrad, this story is both timely and timeless, a genuine classic of the genre.

If I were going to try to predict the future of SF itself, I'd start with Cory Doctorow.