Celebrating and creating written art of our near future world: a proposal & a meet-up
Meet in Brooklyn on April 24th to celebrate the best short fiction published from January to March that imagines life in our near future world. And let's do that in community and every quarter.
I want to build a community that celebrates and creates short fiction imagining life in our near future world, the world three months to a few years out. And do that together and do it fast every quarter. Below is a plan, and further below is my motivation for this project.
Join on April 24th to select and celebrate: Come join on Thursday April 24th in Brooklyn Heights from 6-8pm (event link to register) where we will select and celebrate:
The best short fiction (< 10,000 words) writing published anywhere between January and March 2025 that imagines life in our near future world. I’m putting up $500 for the best piece.
The best ‘Fragment of the Future’, a very short less than 1,000 word piece imagining an encounter, emotion, or brief story of life in our near future world written by someone (maybe you) as part of this project. I’m putting up $250 for the best piece.
Ahead of April 24th, here are further ways to help out or get involved.
Recommend a short story published between January and March 2025 for consideration for our prize. $100 award to the first person who recommends the short story we select. Recommend using this form by April 21st.
Submit your own: Write and share your ‘Fragment of the Future’, a quick < 1,000 word piece. Submit using this form by April 21st.
Share with others: Please pass on the word to friends and communities that may be interested. You can share this email or pass on the website artnearfuture.world.
Help: And if you’d like to be more involved – in helping set up the event on the 24th, curate art, take this more online, or bring this further to life and scale – please write: art.near.future.world@gmail.com.
Follow: I’m excited to organize and plan this further. Subscribe to this Substack which I’ll use for planning and updates.
The near future could be very different.
Maybe that won’t turn out to be the case, just like a bit more than five years ago maybe a virus in Wuhan won’t spread. But, whether we long for it or dismiss it, the wheels of history can turn, and they can sometimes spin fast, make us dizzy or drive us forward, and sometimes break us.
I want to celebrate, encourage, and help us – and yes, you and me – create art that imagines and sets itself in the many possible folds of our near future world, the world three months to a few years out.
I don’t think there’s been enough of that kind of art. Art that imagines the near future world is best created close to the present, and our worthy novels and books lag today by a year or more. You can trace that in the publishing timelines of novels set in the pandemic, or mark it in the gap between May 2023 when an editor first reached out about writing a book on Nvidia and when the excellent book came out in December 2024.
Yes, we can draw, and take photos, and make videos, and so much of what we consume is already in those forms. But still, making visual art of our near future is not yet as accessible to everyone.
Short fiction is the way we can all quickly imagine our near future
Instead, I think short form fiction writing is a medium especially suited to imagining our near future world. Short form writing can stay connected to a quickly changing present, and it can be broadly made and consumed. It requires the audience to be deeply present and to co-create the world the words describe. Writing can push us a bit farther from our screens and deeper into our imagination.
If short form fiction writing can be made more quickly, it should also be celebrated with speed too. Artistic awards mostly run on a yearly clock, and of course the judgment of posterity takes its time to reach its own conclusions. But I want to try recognizing and encouraging writing each quarter of the year.
We can be partners both in celebrating that art and in making it. There’s room in the proud and delightful but often overlooked tradition of flash fiction of a kind of writing that’s within all our reach. I like to call it a fragment – some writing up to 1,000 words that can’t say everything, but it can try to tell some things sharply and well. It can catch an experience, an emotion, a feeling of the future, a quick look around the bend. What’s your diary entry two years from now? These short fragments are also fitting for the lightness of this project: they are not trying to prove out or argue for what the future will bring but dance briefly with some of its possibilities.
What may it be like to talk to an older parent not to take away their car keys but to convince them to sit back and trust the self-driving car?
Or to be a parent of a sick child and to push your AIs faster and faster to work on a cure?
Or the anger when you learn a friend has been using an AI to respond to you.
What’s the cost of setting up your parent with an AI voice agent to take the place of their IT support calls you’ve long fielded?
Maybe you’re overseas and the IT outsourcing firm had been your path off the farm and you feel the maw of the machines devouring your job.
Or you can fall in love and chat through the night (and through the years) with someone without ever having spoken the same language.
Do the Amish dare ask why more newcomers want to join?
Are you bitter that the AI listens better than your boyfriend?
Does the couple argue about whether they need to take off the AR goggles in front of the kids or in front of each other?
How delighted are the hands of the doctor who no longer has to type late at night?
There’s writing out there thinking through the possible changes to our world, and ambitions and side projects are being stitched together in code and concrete to make different dreams real. But in addition to building the future, I’m excited to celebrate and write a bit more imagining life in those new structures and what kind of home they will feel like.
I’m planning to gather quarterly to recognize and celebrate written art imagining our near future world. And start by focusing on two categories:
Any published short story (say, under 10,000 words) from the prior quarter
Any fragment (under 1,000 words) written by someone in the community and not previously published more than a quarter ago
The goal of the first category is to cast the widest net across recent published writing. The goal of the second category is to encourage creative writing in the community itself.
So:
Join on April 24th to select and celebrate: Come join on Thursday April 24th in Brooklyn Heights from 6-8pm (event link to register) where we will select and celebrate:
The best short fiction (< 10,000 words) writing published anywhere between January and March 2025 that imagines life in our near future world. I’m putting up $500 for the best piece.
The best ‘Fragment of the Future’, a very short less than 1,000 word piece imagining an encounter, emotion, or brief story of life in our near future world written by someone (maybe you) as part of this project. I’m putting up $250 for the best piece.
Ahead of April 24th, here are further ways to help out or get involved.
Recommend a short story published between January and March 2025 for consideration for our prize. $100 award to the first person who recommends the short story we select. Recommend using this form by April 21st.
Submit your own: Write and share your ‘Fragment of the Future’, a quick < 1,000 word piece. Submit using this form by April 21st.
Share with others: Please pass on the word to friends and communities that may be interested. You can share this email or pass on the website artnearfuture.world.
Help: And if you’d like to be more involved – in helping set up the event on the 24th, curate art, take this more online, or bring this further to life and scale – please write: art.near.future.world@gmail.com.
Follow: I’m excited to organize and plan this further. Subscribe to this Substack which I’ll use for planning and updates.
I’m not quite sure what shape this celebration and work will take. I hope you join in imagining and making it real.
- Ramon Gonzalez