Seeking experimental microstories

Call for Stories

The TFF-X (The Future Fire—ten years) anthology will contain 15 reprinted or slightly revised stories, plus at least as many new pieces that we hope will give an idea of the sort of things we’d like to see more of in the magazine in the future. We’re enthusiastically looking forward to the next decade, as well as celebrating the last one.

If you think you can help us to exemplify different and experimental modes/kinds of social-political, diverse, progressive and speculative stories, we’d love to hear from you. Some of our ideas are listed below. We're looking for very short pieces, so 500-1000 words is about right (or equivalent, for comics/poetry). We'll pay $20 per piece, and this call will remain open until we have the 5-10 new pieces we need to fill the volume (or until the end of October at the latest, at which point we'll have to firm up the table of contents if we’re to publish the anthology before the end of 2015). If you have any other experimental ideas—try us! Email your submissions or pitch ideas to fiction@futurefire.net with a subject line beginning “TFF-X submission: (title of work)” and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Genre, style or conceit (many of these can be summed up as “ekphrasis”—a representation of one art form via the medium of another):

1. Story written as a theater or radio play, or as an interview
2. Story written as a pitch for a TV show or web series
3. Story in the form of an online user review for a science-fictional/fantastic product (hoverboard, replicator, magic wand? You can think of something more original than this!)
4. Design a poster or one-page advert for a made-up book or film
5. Story in the form of a critical review of a non-existent book (no spoilers!)
6. Story in the form of a user guide for a videogame or a module for an RPG
7. Story told via a letter or letters (letter to a magazine advice column; letter of complaint; rejection letter for a job/story/grant; letter of condolence/congratulation; any letter that isn’t just the sender telling a story to the recipient)

Theme, content or medium (can be combined with one of the above, if you want to be hyper-efficient):

1. Stories written largely/partly (or with dialogue) in a language or dialect other than US-English—with no apology or translation for the reader
2. Bi/pansexual and trans/nonbinary characters (we do pretty well with queer representation otherwise)
3. Utopian story—a world that satirizes our own by being visibly better than it in some significant way (doesn’t have to be perfect)
4. Absurdist or nonsense piece—any combination of surrealism, dadaism, bizarro, dream-quest
5. Horror and dark fantasy (so many possible modes)
6. Poetry (any style; up to 40 lines)
7. Graphic/comics story (2-4 pages)

All stories should of course be social-political, diverse, intersectional, and all the others things that TFF want to see in fiction anyway!

(If you would like to read more about what some of our editors would like to see more of in TFF in the future, the question has been addressed by Kathryn, Cécile, Valeria and Djibril in recent interviews. More suggestions welcome!)

Submission guidelines summary:

Length: approx. 500-1000 words (poems 40 lines, comics, 2-4 pages)
Email submissions as attachment to fiction@futurefire.net
Deadline: October 31, 2015, or sooner if filled
Pay: $20 (USD) per story, poem, comic, etc.

Re-opened: "Number 10"-themed writing challenge

Re-opening this writing contest due to insufficient numbers of entries the first time around. Let's try and make this more fun, shall we?

As part of The Future Fire’s tenth anniversary celebration, blog tour, anthology and fundraiser, we are holding a flash writing game / book giveaway with great prizes to be won. Thanks to the fabulous generosity of Jennifer Marie Brissett and Stephanie Saulter, you can win a copy of the Dick- and Locus-nominated Elysium or the first two novels (Gemsigns and Binary) of the acclaimed ®Evolution trilogy.

To play: write a micro-short speculative story on the theme of the Number Ten. This can be anything from a single tweet, FB post, or cartoon image, up to a maximum of 500 words. The shorter, snappier and more inventive use of the number 10, the better! It needs to be read and enjoyed in a single visit. What's the scariest thing about the number ten? What's the most futuristic/sensawunda concept ten can evoke? Why is ten such a big deal…

To enter either:

1. post your text or image to a blog, tumblr, twitlonger, pastebin etc., or screencap the text, and tweet the link or image with the hashtag #TFFX; please also post a separate tweet in your own words asking people to support the fundraiser at igg.me/at/tffx;
2. or post it to Facebook, tagging facebook.com/thefuturefire so we see it; also like and share the FB post (here) promoting the fundraiser.

Given enough interest this time around, all qualifying stories submitted by midnight Pacific on Sunday, August 30th will be read by the judges, and a winner or winners will be chosen to receive the books. The criteria for judging will include the quality of the fiction and how cunningly the number ten is integrated in the story. Winners will be contacted as soon as possible thereafter for contact details. No correspondence will be entered into.

(Editors of TFF and others affiliated with the giveaway are welcome to join in the fun of writing and posting stories, but will not be entered into the contest.)

Writing contest for TFFX celebration

As part of The Future Fire’s tenth anniversary celebration we are holding a flash writing contest with fabulous prizes to be won. Thanks to the generosity of Jennifer Marie Brissett and Stephanie Saulter, you can win a copy of the Dick- and Locus-nominated Elysium or the first two novels (Gemsigns and Binary) of the acclaimed (R)Evolution trilogy.

To enter, write a speculative fiction story of less than 500 words based on the theme of the Number Ten, and either:

1. post it to a blog, tumblr, twitlonger, pastebin etc., or screencap the text, and tweet the link or image with the hashtag #TFFX; please also post a separate tweet in your own words asking people to support the fundraiser at igg.me/at/tffx —again using the #TFFX hashtag;
2. or post it to Facebook, tagging facebook.com/thefuturefire; also like and share the FB post (here) promoting the fundraiser.

All qualifying stories submitted before midnight UTC on Sunday, August 23rd will be read by the judges, and a winner or winners will be chosen to receive the books. The criteria for judging will include the quality of the fiction and how convincingly the number ten is integrated in the story. Winners will be contacted as soon as possible thereafter for contact details. No correspondence will be entered into.

(Editors of TFF and others affiliated with the giveaway are welcome to join in the fun of writing and posting stories, but will not be entered into the contest.)

#EuropeanMonsters #WritingPrompt competition

Hello, everyone!

This could be your prize!

You may have noticed that Djibril of The Future Fire has been running some fantastically #EuropeanMonsters specific #WritingPrompts on Twitter that are now starting to overflow on to Facebook and the British Fantasy Society's forums. He's even been kind enough to keep an eye on the resulting work and keep a Storify of them.

Well, we - the editorial team and Fox Spirit Books - were persuaded to get in on the action. So, here's what we're going to do. We are offering one shiny paperback copy of European Monsters to the most appreciated response to Djibril's European Monsters writing prompts. To see what you could win, have a look at the book page on the Fox Spirit website.

And here's what you need to do:

1. Write a response to one of the daily #WritingPrompts starting with the "Am here to give my testimony of how I became a ..." Djibril supplies.
2. Submit it on Twitter (use the tags so he can find them), Facebook (in reply to the posts on The Future Fire account) or the BFS forum (use the forum thread linked above).
3. Get peope to vote for you on the survey, which will be opened once the writing prompts have closed (this post will be updated with a link when the form becomes available) is now open.

The writing prompts will continue until Sunday (28th), so all responses need to be submitted by midnight / end of Sunday (GMT).

Voting for the favourite entry closes by midnight / end of Wednesday 31st - better known as New Year's Eve - so don't forget to get your votes in.

Once we've had a chance to crawl out from under our hangovers (assuming alcohol is involved at New Year's), we'll compile the results and announce the winner on Twitter, Facebook and the BFS forum thread by the end of Thursday (1st).

Good luck and write well!

Jo Thomas

SF twitfic contest for young writers

To celebrate the recent successes achieved by the We See a Different Frontier: postcolonial speculative fiction anthology, we're going to run another "twitfic" microfiction writing contest over the first couple weeks of the new year. If you are under 20 years old, this is your chance to win a handful of lovely prizes by writing a short story that fits within a single tweet (with space for hashtags) on the topic of colonialism-themed speculative fiction.

The rules:

• To be elligible to enter, you must not yet have reached your twentieth birthday on the day you post the tweet
• Your entire story should be under 125 characters long. Post your story in a tweet along with both the hashtags #wsadf #YAscifi
• Your story can be in any of the subgenres of science fiction, fantasy, horror or even surreal or magical realist, whatever works for you, so long as you include the theme of colonisation from the perspective of the colonized
• For an idea of what sort of stories themes might work, see the original call for submissions for the colonial SF/F anthology
• The closing date for entries is midnight UTC on Wednesday January 15th, 2014
• Prize-winning stories may be used in promotional contexts and other materials for the We See a Different Frontier anthology. All other rights, including full copyright, remain with the authors.

The prizes:

• One winner will receive a hardcopy of We See a Different Frontier; a one-year e-book subscription to Crossed Genres magazine; a signed copy of Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria; a reading slot in the outro of an instalment of one of the Escape Artists fiction podcasts; a copy of Ilike Merey's graphic novel a+e 4ever from Lethe Press.
• At the judges' discretion, one or more runners-up may in addition be offered e-book copies of the WSaDF anthology.

The judges:
The winning story and runners-up will be selected by the panel of judges, made up of:

• Malinda Lo (author of Ash and Huntress)
• Catherine Krahe (Alpha Workshop and Strange Horizons)
• Regina de Búrca (TFF co-editor and YA author)

Cool Wikipedia categories and lists

Wikipedia is not only an ever-changing, almost pathologically up-to-date, populist source of post-encyclopaedic information ("knowledge" is maybe too distilled a concept for this resource); because of its born-digital, crowdsourced, collectively tagged content, it is also a veritable tangled-net of categories, lists, statistical flukes and fortuitous agglomerations of tenuously related items. I know people who have used Wikipedia links as a mini-Semantic Web to test relationships between concepts and places. Some of the most interesting pages on the web are the Category pages, where one can browse the keywords with which this meta-encyclopaedia's entries have been tagged.

Last night, George Dvorky listed twenty of his favourite lists on Wikipedia, only a few of which were organic categories as I describe them above. You can see his interest in paradoxes, unsolved problems and natural disaster (just as the category ghosttown in my Delicious reveals my obsession with abandoned human settlements). All fascinating lists, by the way, especially the ones with statistics attached.

It got me thinking about the category pages that I find most fun and scintillating to browse. One of the nicest things about these is that their contents page have changed since I linked to them. The other nice thing is that they're a mine for story ideas.

• Out-of-place artifacts - these are interesting precisely because they're not in the next category: in archaeology, as in hard science, a one-off is often considered a fluke or a hoax, but these seem to be real. Hard to explain, lacking in context, but not obviously bogus.
• Archaeological forgeries - there are more fun, but fodder for "what if" or alternate history type stories: what if they weren't forgeries, but real? (Okay, let's not get into van Dänicken territory...)
• Fictional writers - we all love writers, especially, it would seem, writers.
• Nonexistent people - people who were or are thought to really exist
• People whose existence is disputed - people we just aren't sure about
• List of people reported to have lived beyond 130 - almost all of these are probably spurious, but what's the fascination with historical longevity? (This is not a category, but the curated list is more useful than the closest category I could find.)
• Fictional languages - again, these are not hoaxes, in most cases, but languages invented for fictional worlds, like Láadan or Klingon. What does it take to invent a language?
• Feminist science fiction - different kind of category, but this is one that could grow as more items get tagged this way. What can you think of that isn't here already?
• List of hoaxes on Wikipedia - a meta-list if ever there was one: entries that were created in Wikipedia, spuriously, and went unnoticed long enough to catch on, or spread to other media, before they were deleted. Catalogued here for posterity, along with a convincing appeal for why you shouldn't try to do this again.

Genderswitching Classic SF

Inspired by this lighthearted Guardian article on Genderswitching classic novels, my holiday challenge is to take a passage from classic speculative fiction (define as you like), and reverse the gender of the pronouns (or otherwise subvert, if you want to make your hero genderqueer, say). What's the most fun you can have? What SF story would be the most changed by the subversion of its genders? Which would be improved?

A couple of ideas to get us started. First (from Honor Philippa Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu):

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on 1 March 1925, a thin, dark young woman of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. Her card bore the name of Henrietta Antonia Wilcox, and my aunt had recognized her as the youngest daughter of an excellent family slightly known to her, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious maiden of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams she was in the habit of relating. She called herself ‘psychically hypersensitive,’ but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed her as merely ‘queer’. Never mingling much with her kind, she had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found her quite hopeless.

And second (from Wilma Gibson's Countess Zero):

She’d come home and gotten right down to it, slotted the icebreaker she’d rented from Two-a-Day and jacked in, punching for the base she’d chosen as her first live target. Figured that was the way to do it; you wanna do it, then do it. She'd only had the little Ono-Sendai deck for a month, but she already knew she wanted to be more than just some Barrytown hotdogger, Bobbi Newmark, aka Countess Zero, but it was already over. Shows never ended this way, not right at the beginning. In a show, the cowgirl heroine's boy or maybe her partner would run in, slap the trodes off, hit that little red OFF stud. So you’d make it, make it through.

Do either of those change the reading of the story significantly? Please add more examples in the comments.