Well here is an exciting thing.

The Comité Colbert is a trade association of French luxury goods manufacturers founded in 1954. Members produce all sorts of things from fashion to champagne to furniture. Also, crucially, some of them publish books. Naturally they exist to encourage people to buy fine French merchandise.

Given all of the doom, gloom and austerity around at the moment, these good people decided that the world needed a bit of cheering up. So they commissioned a bunch of French science fiction writers to imagine a utopia (set in 2074) in which everyone would be able to partake of a little French luxury.

The result is an anthology called Dreaming 2074. And because this is, after all, a marketing exercise, the Comité Colbert has paid to have the book translated into English, and is making the ebook edition available for free. You can download it here.

So basically you lucky people are getting seven stories by top French science fiction writers translated into English for free. Well, six writers actually. One of the stories is a musical interlude present in the book only as a QR code. Anyway, go snap them up. The Table of Contents is as follows:

• Porphyrian Tree (Xavier Mauméjean)
• Amber Queen (Olivier Paquet)
• Facets (Samantha Bailly)
• Future Mirages (Roque Rivas) (Musical illustration)
• Diamond Anniversary (Jean-Claude Dunyach)
• A Corner of Her Mind (Anne Fakhouri)
• The Chimeras’ Gift (Joëlle Wintrebert)