While Apple’s founder Steve Jobs gets the biopic treatment, Microsoft is turning to science fiction, with some of the top names in SF and fantasy lining up for a collection of stories inspired by the technology giant’s current research.

Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire and Greg Bear are just some of the authors who have contributed to its Future Visions, after the company invited them into its research labs “to expose them to what some people might think is science fiction”.

The anthology, which also includes work from Elizabeth Bear, David Brin and Robert J Sawyer, is pitched as “original fiction inspired by Microsoft”, featuring “new works that predict the near future of technology and examine its complex relationship to our core humanity”. Free in ebook, the stories were written following meetings between the authors and Microsoft research scientists who were working on what the company said were its “most cutting edge areas of research”, ranging from quantum computing to prediction analytics, virtual teleportation and computing that relates to emotion.

Steve Clayton, who was described as Microsoft’s “chief storyteller” in the announcement, said that “the idea was to bring authors in to expose them to what some people might think is science fiction”.

He added: “We didn’t show them a piece of technology and ask them to please write about that. We showed them technology and introduced them to a group of people, and then asked them, what did it spark in your mind as ideas? Where did it inspire you to think the technology may go?”

Greg Bear’s The Machine Starts riffs on the consequences of quantum computing, David Brin looks at the science of prediction in The Tell, and Nancy Kress considers machine intelligence in Machine Learning. Ann Leckie’s story, Another Word for World, is set in the far future and is sparked by her interest in machine translation and communication.

“It’s easy to mechanically say this word should always be translated ‘truck’, but something else to take a phrase and say, well actually in this sentence, it ought to be translated this way, or it means this. And then there’s the challenge of trying to figure out the emotional context of a sentence. If you know the speaker is agitated, that provides part of how you’re translating the sentence,” said Leckie.

The novelist’s award-winning trilogy, which opens with Ancillary Justice, is set in a universe where gender is irrelevant, and where all characters, regardless of gender, are referred to as “she”. “Language really interests me, the different ways it frames how you look at the world and the ways you can talk about different things easily or less easily depending on what your language is set up to do,” she said in Microsoft’s announcement, adding: “Science fiction can be about a lot of things, but one of the many things I like about it is the way it plays with scientific ideas and ideas about technology. This sounded like a cool way to see what was coming down the way.”

Four years ago, Nasa teamed up with the US publisher Tor/Forge, pairing authors with scientists and engineers from the space agency for a line of “Nasa-inspired works of fiction” that they promised would be “scientifically accurate and entertaining”.

Jennifer Henshaw, a co-editor of the Microsoft anthology and a communications manager with Microsoft Technology and Research, said that the company wanted the book to be “meaningful to the sci-fi community – not as a piece that was published by Microsoft, but as a piece of science fiction literature that stands on its own. And I think it achieves that.”