Ongoing Submissions: The Future Fire

Payment: $20 for each original story over 1000 words accepted, or $10 per flash piece (up to 1000 words)

The Future Fire welcomes submissions of speculative fiction with progressive, inclusive and socially aware disposition. We are particularly interested in feminist, queer, postcolonial and ecological themes, and we actively seek out submissions by under-represented voices, including but not limited to women, people of color, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and writers from outside the English-speaking world.

If you are thinking of submitting a piece of writing for consideration by The Future Fire, please read some recent issues to get a feel for the sorts of speculative fiction we are looking for. When submitting, read the following guidelines carefully:

1. We are reasonably flexible with regard to format and length, but are extremely unlikely to publish any story over 10 000 words. (We have in the past occasionally taken longer stories, up to 20 000 words, to be serialised; this will probably be less likely in the future, and obviously would require a story to be of better than excellent quality and value. We must in any case have the whole story before we make any decision.)
2. All submissions are read anonymously and judged on their merits and fit to TFF‘s goals. We actively encourage the submission of stories by women, people of colour, LGBTQ+, differently abled/neuroatypical, and other groups under-represented in genre fiction.
3. Please send your story to the fiction editor () as an attachment. We prefer .doc, .docx, .rtf or .odt files (query first for any other format). Please use a common, easy-to-read font such as Times New Roman/Palatino and use no other formatting than italics. Do not include your name anywhere in the document. We read and make all decisions based upon anonymised submissions.
4. Use the email subject line: TFF submission: Surname, ‘Title’ (word count). Give your prefered name or pen name/byline in full in the accompanying email. Please do not send us your full address or other contact details.
5. No multiple submissions: please only submit one story at a time. 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.
6. We prefer to publish original material. Previously published stories are not out of the question, but you must let us know if a story has appeared elsewhere when you submit. This includes stories posted to blogs, open access writing groups or other public fora, even if they are no longer available there. We are more likely to reprint a story if its previous appearance was in a venue not readily accessible to our main audience, either because of medium, date, genre, or other factors.
7. A decision is usually made within one month 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.
8. The Future Fire is offering payment of $20 for each original story over 1000 words accepted, or $10 per flash piece (up to 1000 words) (to be paid via Paypal on publication).
9. 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 shall need 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 “dead” name or other sensitive information. We will in any case never ever share this information with anyone else.)

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 would remain available permanently).

Via: The Future Fire.