Call for Submissions: TFF Noir

This Call for Submissions is now closed

Call for stories and poems for a Noir-themed issue/anthology from The Future Fire to be published in early 2022, guest edited by Valeria Vitale.

We are looking for stories that combine themes or aesthetic from Noir fiction and cinema with the existing goals of TFF (progressive, feminist, queer, postcolonial, inclusive, accessible, ecological and international speculative and genre fiction). Stories by authors from under-represented groups are especially welcome, although you are not expected or required to self-identify in any way.

Submissions need not include science-fictional or fantastic settings, but we are mostly likely to be interested in those that play with genre and Noir aesthetic in some way, including cyberpunk. Tropes we are not generally interested in include:

1. Women who die just to make the male protagonist sad
2. Characters committing or enabling crimes to hide their sexual orientation/preferences
3. Other plots whose impact revolves entirely around normative/puritanical/prejudiced assumptions (characters may have such opinions, but the story shouldn’t validate them)
4. Detective stories where law and order unproblematically win the day

Please submit stories for the attention of the editors of this issue by sending as a .docx or .doc attachment to fiction@futurefire.net with subject line “TFF NOIR (title) (wordcount),” before the end of December 24, 2021.

• TFF Noir will pay $50 (US) for each original short story or novelette (up to 17,500 words) or $25 for flash (up to 1000 words) or poem (up to 100 lines). (Please note that for some longer stories this will amount to under 1¢/word, and you will no longer be able to sell “first publication rights” to this story in the future.)
• Reprints are welcome, but the pay rate will be half that for original works ($25 for shorts/novellettes; $12.50 for flash/poems).
• Please do not send work that is also under consideration elsewhere (no simultaneous submission).
• We will consider stories from the regular TFF slushpile for the TFF Noir anthology (and vice versa), so you do not need to send the story to both places.