Joey Eschrich

Joey Eschrich is the managing editor for the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University and assistant director for Future Tense, a partnership of ASU and New America that explores emerging technologies, culture, policy, and society. He is part of the editorial team behind Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories about technology, policy, and the future.

He has co-edited a number of books of science fiction, nonfiction, and art, including Climate Imagination (MIT Press, 2025) and The Climate Action Almanac (2024), supported by a grant from the ClimateWorks Foundation; Our Radioactive Neighbors (2025), supported by the U.S. Department of Energy; Sound Systems (2025), supported by the Sphinx Organization and the Flinn Foundation; Cities of Light (2021), a collaboration with the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory; The Weight of Light (2019), supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation; Future Tense Fiction (Unnamed Press, 2019); and Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities (2017), supported by NASA. He has co-edited two essay collections: Imagining Transmedia (MIT Press, 2024) and The Rightful Place of Science: Frankenstein (Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, 2017).

He edits the book series Imagination, Annotated, published by the MIT Press, in collaboration with Ed Finn and David H. Guston. The series presents compelling works of speculative fiction with annotations, essays, and other materials that illuminate the historical context and enduring questions that animate their visions of the future.

He was the managing editor for Hieroglyph (William Morrow, 2014) and Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, 2017). He was a fiction editor, with Brenda Cooper and Cynthia Selin, for A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2019), which was named one of the best art books of the year by the New York Times.

He edits Imaginary Papers, a quarterly newsletter about science fiction worldbuilding, futures thinking, and imagination, and hosts CSI Skill Tree, which explores and celebrates how video games envision the future and build rich, thought-provoking worlds. From 2012 through 2021, he hosted the Science Fiction TV Dinner event series.

From 2016 through 2022, he ran ASU's Everything Change global climate fiction contests with colleagues at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. These contests led to the publication of three anthologies of climate fiction.

His writing has appeared in Slate, Literary Hub, Zócalo Public Square, Locus Magazine, and the British Science Fiction Association's magazine Vector; in the scholarly journals Men and Masculinities, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Science and Engineering Ethics, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Information, Communication & Society, and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; and in the book Science Fiction and the Dismal Science (McFarland & Company, 2019). He served as a guest editor for the winter 2021 issue of SFRA Review, the journal of the Science Fiction Research Association.

He earned his master’s degree in Gender Studies in 2011 from ASU’s School of Social Transformation, and his bachelor’s degree in Film and Media Studies in 2008 from ASU’s Barrett, the Honors College and College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.