Accessing the Future

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Inspired by the cyberpunk and feminist science fiction of yesterday and the DIY, open access, and hacktivist culture of today, Accessing the Future will be an anthology that explores the future potentials of technology to augment and challenge the physical environment and the human form—in all of its wonderful and complex diversity. We are particularly interested in stories that address issues of disability (invisible and visible, physical and mental), and the intersectionality of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class—in both physical and virtual spaces. Accessing the Future will be a collection of speculative fiction that places emphasis on the social, political, and material realms of being.

We want stories from as many diverse people as possible, especially from people with disabilities (visible and invisible, physical and mental), chronic illness or mental illness, who are neuroatypical, or people who have an understanding of the institutional and social construction of disability. We welcome stories from marginalized groups within the speculative fiction community (e.g., QUILTBAG, people of colour, non-North American writers), and from anyone with sensitivity to intersectional politics.

Payment and Rights

We pay $0.06/word (six cents a word) for global English first publication rights in print and digital format. The authors retain copyright.

Submission Guidelines

• Send your submissions to accessingfuture-at-gmail.com by midnight UTC on December 31st, 2014.
• Length 2500-7500 words (with a preference for 4000-6000 words).
• No reprints or simultaneous submissions.
• Attach your story as a .doc, .docx, or .rtf file, with your name, the story title, and the wordcount on the first page.
• We do not require or request that submitting writers identify themselves as a person with a disability, but we respect anyone’s desire to self-identify.

What we want

We want stories that place emphasis on intersectional narratives (rejection of, undoing, and speaking against ableist, heteronormative, racist, cissexist, and classist constructions) and that are informed by an understanding of disability issues and politics at individual and institutional levels. We want to read stories from writers that think critically about how prosthetic technologies, new virtual and physical environments, and genetic modifications will impact human bodies, our communities, and planet. Here are some questions we want writers to think about

• How will humanity modify the future world?
• What kinds of new spaces will there be to explore and inhabit? Who will have access to these spaces and in what ways?
• Given that we all already rely on (technological) tools to make our lives easier, what kinds of assistive and adaptive technologies will we use in the future?
• How will augmentations (from the prosthetic to the genetic) erase or exacerbate existing differences in ability, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and race?
• What does an accessible future look like?

We will not accept

• Stories of “cure” (or where disability exists as a condition to be “fixed,” erased through genetic engineering, etc.)
• Depictions of people with disabilities as “extra special,” “magical,” or “inspirational” because of their disability.
• Stories that generally reproduce today’s dominant reductionist viewpoints of disability as a fixed identity and a problem to be solved.
• Any story that addresses disability in a realistic and “positive” way but contains any element that is racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise insulting or harmful to other marginalized identities.

About the Editors and Publisher

Futurefire.net Publishing is the publisher of both The Future Fire magazine of social-political speculative fiction, and of two previous anthologies, Outlaw Bodies (2012, co-edited by Lori Selke) and We See a Different Frontier (2013, co-edited by Fabio Fernandes). Djibril al-Ayad, a historian and futurist, co-edited both volumes and has edited TFF since 2005.

Kathryn Allan is an independent scholar of feminist SF, cyberpunk, and disability studies, and is the inaugural Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellow (2013-14). She is editor of Disability in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure (2013, Palgrave MacMillan), an Associate Editor and Reader of The Future Fire, and her writing appears in both academic and popular venues. She tweets and blogs as Bleeding Chrome.