Fiction submissions

The Future Fire welcomes submissions of speculative fiction with progressive, inclusive and socially aware disposition. All stories in TFF magazine are selected from the open submission pile. We are particularly interested in feminist, queer, postcolonial and ecological themes, and writing by under-represented voices (but nobody is required to self-identify, publicly or privately, as any identity).

We prefer to publish original material, but will consider reprints (which includes stories posted to blogs, open access writing groups or other public fora, even if no longer online). We are more likely to reprint a story if its previous appearance was in a venue not readily accessible, such as in print, or no longer available. You must let us know if a story has appeared elsewhere when you submit.

We love to see translated or multilingual stories and poems—if you are the translator, please make sure you have the author or rightholder's permission to publish your translation before submitting; if you are the author, credit the translator. And please let us know if you are offering both original and English versions, or only the translation.

If you are thinking of submitting a piece of writing for consideration by The Future Fire, please read the following guidelines carefully:

1. Please only submit one story or poem at a time (no multiple submissions). The Future Fire will consider stories up to 17 500 words. There is no minimum word length.
2. No simultaneous submissions: please do not send work that is under consideration elsewhere. If you need to withdraw a story for whatever reason, please do so as early as possible.
3. Please send your story as an email attachment to fiction (at) futurefire.net. A decision is usually made within six weeks but sometimes life gets in the way of efficiency, for which we apologise. Important: emails sometimes go astray, so please do query if you feel we are taking an unreasonable time to get back to you.
4. We prefer .docx files, but can also read .doc, .rtf or .odt (query first for any other format), in an easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman/Palatino and using no other formatting than italics. Do not include your name anywhere in the document; we make all decisions based upon anonymised submissions.
5. Use the subject line: TFF submission: Surname, 'Title' (word count)—substituting actual author surname, story title and word count, of course. Give your prefered name, byline or pen name in full in the accompanying email.
6. The Future Fire offers payment of $20 for each story (over 1000 words) accepted, or $10 per flash piece (up to 1000 words), to be be paid via Paypal on publication.

Contract

Upon acceptance of a story, we shall ask authors to agree to this electronic contract: “You [LEGAL NAME*] of [ADDRESS] grant us, The Future Fire, the non-exclusive right to publish your work [TITLE] by [PEN NAME BYLINE OR PSEUDONYM] on the pages of our website and in the downloadable e-book versions; all other rights to this work belong to you. We shall upon publication make payment of [$20/$10] ([twenty/ten] US dollars) by Paypal to the account [EMAIL ADDRESS]. If we have not published your story within one calendar year of this contract, all rights shall revert to you. You guarantee that this work is your own and that you have the right to grant us the use of it, and that the work contains nothing that breaks copyright or other laws. Any actions breaking such laws will be your sole responsibility. We will print a copyright notice in your name, but we will not register the work with any copyright office on your behalf. You may reprint or adapt the work anywhere in the world, but we would ask as a courtesy that you wait three months after publication and credit us for first appearance.”

(*For the contract we normally require a legal name and mailing address, even if you wish your work to be published under a pseudonym. If for safety or other reasons you have a name you are commonly known by that can be used to identify you in official contexts, please feel free to give us this rather than a former name or other sensitive information. We will in any case never ever share this information with anyone else.)

If you have a public Twitter handle and would like us to tag you in promotional tweets when the issue comes out, please let us know at this point also.

It is the intention of The Future Fire to keep an indefinite archive of stories published in HTML; if an author has a pressing (e.g. legal) need to have a story removed, however, we shall of course help them to comply. We may not be able to remove the story from the copy of the PDF issue that is deposited with national libraries, archived by the Internet Archive, and other places outside of our control (just as a paper periodical archived in a national library remains available permanently).