Interview with General Editor, Djibril al-Ayad

The Future Fire are celebrating with a bumper volume for this, our fiftieth issue—three times the word-length of our usual issues—full of novelettes and long poems. I am interviewing our General Editor, Djibril al-Ayad in recognition of this release.

Bruce Stenning: Djibril, how has the content of The Future Fire changed over the course of the last fifty issues, and what would you like to see more of in submissions in the future?

TFF #16 cover © 2009 Rachel H. White

Djibril al-Ayad: The main thing that changed in the key growth period between the first few issues and, let’s say, issue #10 or #15 when I think we could start to call ourselves a serious fiction venue, was the volume of submissions that come with greater exposure and reputation (or perhaps principally community). This volume allowed us to be highly selective in what we published, not only on quality (which we were already), but on theme, genre, social-political content, inclusiveness and representation. This in turn enabled us to build a reputation for—as we now specify it—social-political and progressive speculative fiction, feminist-, queer-, eco- and multicultural SF, which leads to our seeing more of that in the slush-pile and being able to publish more of it. I would love to see more fiction in some of the rarer intersections of these social-justice areas, and especially #ownvoices writing. Even better, we should be collaborating with editors from these and other marginalizations, so that we don’t become the self-appointed gatekeepers for these minority voices.

On a different note, I would also love to see more stories that use form, medium and genre in creative and mischievous ways: book reviews that turn out to be fabricated, fiction masquerading as non-fiction, ekphrasis, surreal or irreal stories, and other postmodern playfulness. We’ll say more about this later, in fact.

BS: I have always been a fan of stories—in any medium—that play with reality or are deceptive with our perception or pre-conception. Do you have any favourite examples of such stories?

DA: The most obvious way to play with expectations like this is by use of the unreliable narrator, either in the manner of Rashomon, where the narrative style (first person narration, flashback, etc.) leads the reader to expect truth, but turns out to be from a very relativist perspective or downright dishonest; or I suppose as in Memento, where the narrator is not only unreliable, but turns out to be actively rewriting reality by lying (to himself). Borges’s œuvre is full of fake book reviews, profiles of non-existent historical villains or mythographic accounts of newly invented folkloric monsters (apparently early in his career he would pass some of these off as non-fiction).

Can you think of any more recent examples, Bruce?

TFF #35 cover © 2015 Laura-Anca
Adascalitei

BS: I think most examples that I can think of at the moment come from film. I need to watch Lucia y el sexo again; I seem to remember that messing with my head greatly, though it is fairly dark. Films that play with reality that I do recommend include: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stranger than Fiction, and Donnie Darko (though I’ve been warned off the director’s cut). Most of Charlie Kaufman’s work I enjoy, and is often a recipe for much head-scratching. Outside film, I can’t help thinking of the way characters in Robert Rankin’s comedy novels interject and play with reality. The literary equivalent of breaking the fourth wall is always fun, but—damn my memory—I’m finding it difficult to remember good examples beyond Rankin, and Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get The Blues. So I shall now misdirect and bring us jarringly back to the real world (or is it?)

BS: The world seems to be caught in an increasingly alarming slipknot, with climate change, global inequality, nuclear threat, misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, the emboldening of the far right, and precarious global market. Do you see Speculative Fiction playing a role in bringing awareness of these issues to people, or would you say that only people who are aware of these issues are likely to seek out or encounter Speculative Fiction?

DA: I don’t know that I’d say the group of people who read SF overlaps particularly with the group who are aware of what a mess things are and believe that we can do anything about it—or should. I’m not sure speculative fiction as a substitute for news or campaigning is particularly efficient either—but I do believe that it is important to recognise the political impact of SF, as all literature and indeed all art. We may not be able to convince anyone of anything, but there’s a lot to be said for helping those who do care to know they’re not alone; those who fear there’s nothing to be done to see even the possibility of resistance; to hold back the darkness for just a few moments with some hopeful imagination. Ursula Le Guin once pointed out the value in preaching to the choir (that it keeps the choir from giving up singing), and I think that’s a really nice metaphor. So I might argue that at this point in time there’s not a lot of point in inventing new dystopias, because you’ll have a tough time surpassing the worst of reality, but fiction with a glimmer of hope, just that fellowship of rebels, that community of survivors, that possibility of love—we all need a bit of that. (Although of course, sometimes the best place to show that little glimmer of hope, narratively, is in a dystopian setting, too…)

TFF #26 cover © 2013 Eric Asaris

BS: So would you like to see gently optimistic stories more closely grounded in the real-world, or is it important that speculative stories provide some distance from the world we are familiar with?

DA: Oh, I totally think there’s room for both, and everything in between. I’m usually not a fan of hardcore dystopia, but a particularly beautifully written one could surely win me over. And I enjoy the deeply optimistic utopian or solarpunk or decolonised stories very much as well—Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic series of stories are a great example of how a world that is magical, beautiful, queer, progressive and utopian in so many ways, can still contain gripping conflict, drama, evil, and suffering. There are also stories set in alien worlds with nothing we would recognise, although they are of course still to some extent stories about ourselves, our concerns, our cultural and political needs.

BS: And for stories that do draw heavily on the real-world, how important do you feel it is that the author is an expert in—or at least versed in—the fields that real-world stories are grounded in?

DA: For fiction, including speculative fiction, it’s important not to legislate away imagination and creativity. So if you want to write a story in a distant galaxy with slightly different laws of physics, but you’re not a theoretical physicist who could write such laws to be credible or at least consistently unbelievable—go the fuck ahead anyway! That said, if you write a “hard social science fiction” story in which your lack of qualification in the social sciences causes you to misunderstand or misrepresent human culture and society to the detriment of the story, then expect to be criticised for it. (Should you consult an expert or do some serious reading in sociology before you publish it? That’s entirely up to you, but the point is just because you’re emphatically allowed to write anything you like, doesn’t mean you should.) The same holds even more true for writing about cultures, languages, religions, heritage traditions that are not you own. Yes we should all write the diversity that we find in the world, but if you fuck up someone else’s culture, not only should you expect to be criticised for it, but you should be aware that if you are white, abled, cishet or Anglo-American etc., you are probably taking up space in the genre thanks to layers of privilege, that someone who could write the setting better could otherwise use. If you’re doing that (and I’m not going to tell you you can’t) then at the very least it behoves you to do the best, most informed, most respectful job of it you can.

BS: If you had to pick the place on Earth where you thought utopia would be most likely to spring from in the next century, where would it be?

TFF #45 cover © 2018 Saleha
Chowdhury

DA: I can’t see it anywhere, honestly. There have been a few societies popped up over the years that could have been, if not utopian, at least interesting political advances, if only they were left alone to give it a try. But of course they won’t be left alone. I’m thinking of radically egalitarian and secular breakaway states, socio-economic experiments, altermondialist approaches and the like, that we’ve seen crushed by coups d’état, trade sanctions, or literal tanks and bombs. But isn’t that what happened to the original “Utopia”?

BS: There does seem to be a strong “inner space” precondition on social reform, in that socially destabilising impulses appear to come largely from self-interest and short-term thinking. There are counter-examples of peoples behaving in sustainable and equity-oriented manners. So do you see this as a “tipping point” scenario where we just need to add enough weight to the scales in order to see a positive feedback effect?

DA: I feel like it would probably take much more than that, but I do agree that every small act of selflessness and social progress is absolutely essential on the road to making the world a sustainable, liveable, and just place.

BS: To change the topic—role-playing games, while collaboratively creative, often fall into the trap of tropes and stereotypes, it being useful to have some common lexicon of ideas to draw consensus or mechanics from. Are there notable exceptions? What should RPGs be taking from SF to alleviate this?

DA: I don’t think this problem is particular to role-playing games, so much as it is to games with rule systems and settings written by people who don’t really have the imagination to go past settings established by Tolkien (or Lovecraft, or Roddenberry, or Gibson). The most egregious culprit in the RPG world may be Dungeons and Dragons, of course, which is a notoriously eugenicist world-system, with racial and gendered traits baked into the rules. At the same time, by virtue of being the largest and one of the oldest systems, with so much scope for inventing new worlds, D&D may be one of the easiest systems in which to subvert these fucked up rules and run a setting in which radical and progressive beliefs about (lack of) genetic and chromosomal determination apply instead. (It’s also particularly fun to play Cthulhu-based games that you know Lovecraft would have hated because of his xenophobia and related bigotries.) And as for learning from Speculative Fiction or any genre of more traditional literature, I’m afraid SF is just as guilty of pumping out reams of retrogressive and conservative crap as the gaming world is. There are many people breaking those rules and subverting those norms, but they have to go out of their way and do so on purpose. I know I haven’t really answered your question about narrative creativity, but I’m much more interested in the politics of a setting than the details of how you choose to tell a story. (Another time, we might talk about the crossover between the two—where interactive fiction becomes a storytelling medium, and is basically impossible to distinguish clearly from gaming.)

BS: Who would you most like to meet, living or dead, for a drink tonight?

DA: I think I would have loved to go for a pint with Vonda N. MacIntyre, who I have chatted with a few times on Twitter, but never had the privilege of meeting in person. I would enjoy chatting with her about social-political and progressive science fiction, on which she had possibly the best perspective I have come across. Maybe after a couple pints I would also have talked to her some more about my favourite character in her Starfarer novels, the sci-fi novelist J.D. Sauvage, and how her particular brand of really alien aliens would transplant to our own literary setting (that is to say in a world in which we’ve not met any aliens and are nowhere near interstellar capability), and what an anthology edited by J.D. might look like today…

BS: If you were told that there was an impending disaster and to preserve yourself you were to be “injected” into a Vonda N. MacIntyre story of your choice, as your current persona, which would you choose, and why?

DA: While the setting of Dreamsnake is an amazing post apocalyptic world with a mix of horror and wonderfully progressive culture, I honestly don’t think I’d survive five minutes there, so the (no less dystopian in some ways) world of Starfarers would have to be my choice—because at the moment I wouldn’t hesitate very long before boarding a self-sustaining intergalactic vessel and going out there to meet some aliens who, while not perfect, might help to put some of our problems into perspective.

BS: What would be the next themed issue or anthology topic that you would want to pick for TFF?

TFF #50 cover © 2019 Pear Nuallak

DA: You’ve got the idea of J.D. Sauvage’s mind-blowing really alien sci-fi anthology in my head now! I’m really now sure how we’d phrase the call for submissions (because surely everyone hopes their sci-fi is really mind-blowing), but I think it would include the idea that not only science, language and philosophy would be very different from humanity’s, but also culture, religion, sex and sexuality (if they exist), morals and mores, and the whole gamut of social-political expectations. That would be pretty cool. But this isn’t a real next anthology plan, just a dream…

In the real world, our next themed issue is going to be on the topic of fiction masquerading as non-fiction (or vice versa), both of which we’ve experimented with in the past. Book reviews of titles that turn out to have been invented by the reviewer as a different way to tell the story… profiles of historical science fiction luminaries who never lived (but should have!)… travel reports for fabricated cities or lands. We’ve always wanted to hear you making up stories, but this time we want you to lie to us!

BS: Yes, I’m also excited by the possibilities that this theme might inspire! Thank you very much for your thoughts.

As mentioned, our Jubilee issue can be found online here.

Interview with co-editor Regina de Búrca

For the occasion of our fiftieth issue, we’re joined by TFF associate editor Regina de Búrca, who looks both back and forward, as we do at milestones like this. We’re having this chat to think about where we have come from, and what social-political and speculative fiction might be in store for us. Regina’s been co-editing for about ten years now, so she knows where a lot of the bodies are buried…

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Regina de Búrca is a writer and editor from the West of Ireland. She is interested in feminist speculative fiction, especially for young adults. She's currently experiencing a resurgent Gothic literature phase and is working her way through the works of Ann Radcliffe for the second time, after a gap of twenty years. Her biggest influences remain Ursula le Guin and Isabel Allende but in relation to TFF stories loves to see authentic and strong voices, coupled with fresh ideas. She can be found procrastinating on Twitter @Regina_dB.

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TFF: How did you first get involved with The Future Fire magazine and Futurefire.net Publishing?

Regina de Búrca: In 2009, I started a job in Dublin where I met then TFF co-editor Leoba, and we quickly bonded over our love of speculative fiction. Leoba introduced me to TFF and I enjoyed reading through back issues. Before long, Leoba asked if I’d like to help out with the slush pile. At first, I was a bit daunted by the idea; back then I was writing for kids but had little commercial success—who was I to judge anyone else’s writing? But I think it was because I took the submissions so seriously that Leoba and Djibril wanted me on board. The first story I gave feedback on was Frank Ray Ard’s “Wings So Foreign” for issue #16. Since then I’ve read through hundreds of stories; and have been rooting for their authors. Speculative fiction, in the broader sense of the term, is a tough genre. There’s nowhere to hide when you have to craft new worlds, as well as structure compelling plots and create engaging characters. There’s nothing like the feeling of identifying a powerfully resonating story and then watching its journey from my inbox to the magazine. It’s been a privilege to read authors’ hard work and I’m enormously proud of TFF’s high standard.

Illustration for “Wings So Foreign”, © 2009, Arianna Ciula

Has editing, revising and slushreading had a measurable impact on your own writing in the meantime?

RDB: Not so much. I think it’s because I work in very different genres. There is a connection between my writing and the work of TFF writers, though. My own adventures in writing and submitting impact my approach as an editor. I’m often on the querying side of the equation, and like most of our writers, I work full time while trying to improve my fiction. So, I know firsthand how much work is involved in crafting stories and what if feels like to put your writing and hence yourself out there. I understand what it’s like to be limited to writing in short bursts while on work breaks or commutes or whatever. I get it! Because of that, I’m a slow reviewer. When I get pieces to review that don’t immediately resonate but I can see what the author is trying to achieve, I tend to err on the side of ‘maybe—let’s find someone to take a second look’, rather than ‘didn’t do it for me, let’s pass.’

If you could run a themed issue or anthology, what topic or slant would you pick?

RDB: I’d really like to see an anthology with a considered and sensitive focus on common mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. It would nicely counteract the media’s portrayals of people experiencing issues—research shows that’s at least one in four of us!—that depict MH experiencers as dangerous or weak. I think an exploration of issues would be very interesting in a speculative fiction framework: how much does discrimination and inequality in society impact our cognitive wellbeing? How much does politics? Economics? I reckon this theme would make a super interesting speculative fiction anthology. I’d love to see what our writers could come up with—the level of innovative thinking that I’ve seen from our anthology submissions is staggering.

You also collect rare books. Do physical books, especially old books, have a particular life that can never be replaced by any other medium (audio, e-book, even film)?

RDB: There will never be a digitized / digital version of a rare book that excites me as much as the original. Sorry! (*Ducks and runs from digital humanities community*). It’s the tactile, multisensory experience that makes reading a rare book far more pleasurable for me than spending time on its digital equivalent. I also find the story of the physical book itself interesting—where it started from, whose collection it belonged to. It’s rarely possible to trace these histories, of course, but I do marvel at how some of these works have survived. I’ve often bought a book for its journey as much for its content. Inscriptions, doodles, newspaper clippings—all things I’ve found in rare books that have taught me something, given me a glimpse into someone else’s past. Also, on a more prosaic level, I spend most of my time staring at a screen at work, so I don’t find the idea of engaging with screens in my spare time very appealing.


What else are you working on at the moment?

RDB: I’m in between drafts of a novel for adults that explores complicated friendships at the moment. My story has had four beta readers and I am at the point where I am not sure whose feedback to follow in the broader sense of theme. Clarity always emerges eventually between drafts eventually, though. As my story progresses, it gets harder to stay motivated. My absolute favourite part of writing is the first draft, the one only I ever see, where I get to call the shots!

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Thanks for joining us, Regina!

TFF #50 author and artist microinterviews

As you may know, after each issue of TFF we like to post a series of micro-interviews with the authors and artists—just a couple of questions each, and short answers of 2–3 sentences. Because not all of you use or follow FB where these go up in the first instance, I’ll collect here links to a few of the posts as they go past. I'll try to keep it updated. It’s always fun to read what people have to say about their own work, and what else they’re up to in the meantime.

• Rebecca Buchanan, author of the poem “Not a Princess but (Yes) There Was a Pea”
• L.E. Badillo, illustrator of “My Plastic Heart, My Metal Hand”
• M.L. Clark, author of “And You Will Know Us by Our Monsters”
• Rachel Linn, illustrator of “Fairest of All”
• A.Z. Louise, author of the poem “Germination”
• Grace P. Fong, illustrator of “The Furious Chisel”
• Jo M. Thomas, author of “Goodbye, Snow Child”
• Carmen Moran, illustrator of “Not a Princess but (Yes) There Was a Pea”
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew, author of “Where Machines Run with Gold”
• Valeria Vitale, illustrator of “And You Will Know Us by Our Monsters”
• Ada Hoffmann, author of “Fairest of All”
• Martin Hanford, illustrator of “Germination”
• Jeana Jorgensen, author of the poem “Walking on Knives”
• Cécile Matthey, illustrator of “Goodbye, Snow Child”
• D.H. Kelly, author of “The Furious Chisel”

If you have any questions for any of these artists, poets or authors, or would like to say anything nice about their work, please feel free to leave a comment below this post, and we’ll make sure it gets seen.

Reprint: ten years of The Future Fire

Reprinted from TFFX (2015, edd. al-Ayad, Matthey and Vitale) [purchase links] as part of our celebration of The Future Fire issue #50 in 2019. Four more years may have passed, but this history of the first ten years, and what we’re trying to do with the zine, still stands.

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This anthology celebrates ten years of The Future Fire magazine (futurefire.net), by both reprinting a few highlight stories from the first thirty-one issues, and including several new, experimental, unusual or aspirational pieces to give a taster of what we’d like to see more of in the next decade.

Issue #1 appeared in January 2005, after a bit of preamble and experimentation the previous year, and apart from a short hiatus to rest up and take stock about halfway through, we’ve been publishing an average of three to four issues per year ever since. We always wanted TFF to be challenging, experimental, progressive, inclusive, political, revolutionary—even if to start with maybe we weren’t sure what we were rebelling against!

The first thing you would notice if you went back in time ten years (or just used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) to look at the TFF website in 2005, would be how god-awful-shitty the web design was. I like to think that’s aesthetics having changed, and it wasn’t quite so ’90s-looking to a 2005 eye, but I’m lying to myself. Still, the evolution from CBBC-quality flames in 2005, via a slightly darker, smoky aesthetic in 2007, to the cathode ray tube Unicode-soup we know and love today in about 2009, echoes the growing confidence we started to have in our niche in the speculative fiction market.

We launched in 2005 as a cyberpunk market (words like “chrome,” “postmodern” and “hyperfiction” peppered our tagline, manifesto and first story contests), but through an accident of community we knew more writers of horror and dark fantasy, and there was almost no conventional scifi in the first several issues. You can hear a bit of diffidence about this in our early editorials, and our craving for that elusive cyberpunk is almost tangible…

But once our slushpile was deep enough that we could reasonably select on genre and theme as well as quality (we were always uncompromising on quality) then our niche was under our control, and we didn’t have to be shy about the geeky, retro, techno-noir look we imagined for ourselves. Not that we ever stopped publishing horror, fantasy and surreal stories as well, of course; and never will.

You might also notice the evolution in our one-line mission statement: “New writing in Dark Speculative Fantasy!” we proclaimed in 2004. “Speculative Fiction, Cyberpunk and Dark Fantasy!” we boomed in 2007. “Social-Political and Speculative Cyberfiction!” we have cried since 2009. Always the line, “An experiment in and celebration of new writing” has sat somewhere in the first paragraph.

We’ve had a thorough turnaround of collaborators too: In 2004 we were Bruce, Joseph, Equus and myself; Joseph and Equus left within days; by 2009 we had been joined by Leoba, David, John and Lois; by 2011 it was just me, which is part of the reason TFF took a year’s hiatus. Now, as of 2015, we are joined by Regina, Kathryn, Tracie, Valeria, Cécile (who has illustrated stories since 2006), Serge; plus Lori and Fabio who have guest-edited anthologies and continue to be valued collaborators.

We have attracted a fabulous team of artists, a critical and generous cohort of reviewers, and a community of support that we plug into via social networks and occasional conventions. We’ve had a huge amount of support, both financial and in-kind, during the crowdfunding campaigns for the last three anthologies, and we engage both productively and cordially with several other small presses, publications and writing communities. In 2005 it was mostly me, sketching and photoshopping, reviewing whatever junk I found lying around, bribing and threatening people to send us their stories, funding the whole thing out of my pocket.

I measure the success of TFF by such intangible things—legends who turn out to have heard of us; people who can publish professionally nonetheless sending us their stories; the generosity and excitement of new and potential collaborators. But if you want more measurable criteria, no less than eight stories first published in our pages have been shortlisted or honorably-mentioned in awards and year’s bests; ten stories have been reprinted in some of the most prestigious and high-quality anthologies such as Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best, Lethe Press’s Heiresses of Russ, the Apex World SF and Mammoth’s SF Stories by Women.

We hope to drive this success ever onwards. Our aim has always been to publish progressive ideas, underrepresented voices, socially important stories, and people clearly think that’s a worthwhile goal. We’ve learned a lot about what all of these mean over the years as well—learned to check our own privilege and be much more sensitive to issues of gender, race, class, ability, language, and so many other facets of oppression. We’re able to be selective now on features above mere quality, fit and taste; in addition we filter by features such as respect, not punching down, lazy stereotypes that we might have missed before we had such an inclusive team able to share their judgements of privilege and oppression with us.

But we’ve also always wanted to have fun, to push the boundaries, to play games that Borges, Kafka, Calvino and Eco would be tickled by, and people seem to enjoy that too. We feel it’s important to treat authors and artists with respect, which among other things means paying them properly for their work, and we have some ideas for improving our finances to do better on that front in the future.

But most importantly, my co-editors Valeria and Cécile have done a great job helping put together this anthology of old and new stories, and we hope you enjoy reading them. If you do, keep coming back to futurefire.net; we plan for there to be plenty more where these came from!

New issue 2019.50

“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

—Greta Thunberg

Issue 2019.50: Jubilee issue

• Cover artist: Pear Nuallak

Novelettes

• ‘The Furious Chisel’, D.H. Kelly (illustrated by Grace P. Fong)
• ‘And You Will Know Us by Our Monsters’, M.L. Clark (illustrated by Dr. T. Eratopo)
• ‘Goodbye, Snow Child’, Jo M. Thomas (illustrated by Cécile Matthey)
• ‘Fairest of All’, Ada Hoffmann (illustrated by Rachel Linn)
• ‘Where Machines Run with Gold’, Benjanun Sriduangkaew (illustrated by Laura-Anca Adascalitei)
• ‘My Plastic Heart, My Metal Hand’, Susan Jane Bigelow (illustrated by L.E. Badillo)

Poetry

• ‘Walking on Knives’, Jeana Jorgensen (illustrated by Eric Asaris)
• ‘Not a Princess, But (Yes) There Was a Pea’, Rebecca Buchanan (illustrated by Carmen Moran)
• ‘Germination’, A.Z. Louise (illustrated by Martin Hanford)

This issue is free to read online

• Full issue and editorial
• Download e-book version: PDF | EPUB | Mobi
• Goodreads page for TFF#50

Call for submissions: longer fiction and poetry

Longer than usual…

Tall Tales!

For the next few weeks, TFF is looking for pieces that are slightly longer than our Guidelines normally specify, for our jubilee issue. While we’re explicitly flexible with regard to wordcount, in the past we have very seldom published stories over 10,000 words or poems over about 60 lines—partly because reading longer works on screen can be a strain. For an upcoming project (more on which later) however, we’re looking to push this boundary upwards.

Do you have a:

• Speculative novelette (story of 7,500–17,500 words)
• Long scifi/fantasy poem (say 100–200 lines)

that we might be interested in?

We’re more flexible than usual with this project, so those boundaries are both permeable, and we’re open to all sorts of liberties with genre, medium and form. Not sure if something qualifies? Try us!

This extended call remains open until May 31, 2019, and for this period, any novelette we purchase for this special issue will be paid the higher rate of $30 (and long poems $15) to celebrate the jubilee.

Increased length and pay rate aside, all our usual guidelines (see fiction; poetry) still apply for this month, and our usual tastes in feminist, queer, postcolonial and environmental themes and underrepresented voices will pertain. But as I said, try us—we’d rather have the chance to decide if something works for us than have you self-reject.