Category: The Future

Posing utopic, apocalyptic, dystopic, or superhero solutions to “The Future.” Writers depict futuristic alternative worlds in politics, environment, gender, religion, sexuality, or ethnography.

Poetry from the Future: “The Uncertainty Ballade” by Daniel Brennan

And of these rivers which curve as all rivers curve the way a scythe claims wheat there the gun’s warm tongue in your hands admire how these hands spread with worship like a greasy and over-thumbed takeout menu no this is not my native violence never the ease of inheritance the violets they are mid-bloom…
Seven Poems from the Future: Jerome Sala

The Last Words of the Replicant, or, Blade Runner Revised “I have tasted flavors of which my fellow replicants have never even dreamed … I have consumed Sweet Mango Pringles in South Koreaand Hawaii-style Poke-bowl crisps in Hungary.I have gobbled down chocolate-coated snacks in Finland and Lasagna-flavored potato chips in Thailand.But I have never understood why…
Fiction from the Future: “Civic Duty” by Meaghan McDavitt

Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked down at the blue and yellow lights. The electric voice reverberated through her mind, a robotic repetition of itself, relentless, forcing her to make the the decision. Please press the button to indicate your choice. Tahara looked at the surrounding cubicles. The maze of decisions.…
The Future Has Fiction: “Scarecrows” by John Mitchell

I was only ever good at two things and being a mother wasn’t one of them. I knew how to disappear when things got hard, and I knew how to make everything worse when I showed back up. True to form, the flood came six months after I returned home. The sea levels rose so…
Fiction from the Future: “Mar-a-Lago” by Matt McBride

Everyone’s thrown a party the night before they’re butchered. Tonight’s Jannelle’s, and she stands onstage in Mar-a-Lago’s Gold and White Ballroom, holding the karaoke machine’s mic as if it were a weapon. An AI Beyonce song plays from a speaker on a tripod. Jannelle can remember about half the words. Mark sits alone at a…
Poetry from the Future: “Today Is New and Plastic” by Steve Roberts

I tuck my bubblegum under my tongueso I can drink water from my plastic cup.I need to feel both the sour tangand the deep, wet relief of being hydratedboth at once; I cannot wait for oneor the other. I put on my suit of “I don’t remember.”My suit of “The past is just a form…
Fiction from the Future: “Professor & I” by Mukul

Outside, at dawn, this is same dew that was once a cloud, once a river, once a pond, once a ray of the sun, once a dust of the stars, and who knows maybe once a syllable of the Word. These ornaments of nature, ornaments of language, an exercise in style and sound and sight…
The Future Has Fiction: “Entering Heaven Alive” by Elijah Sparkman

I was telling my students about the drought that was coming. The floods. Climate change and refugees. Storms. Famines. The droughts and the deaths. We were at Northern Michigan University. It was a Good Books Class. We were reading Octavia Butler and my students were from the suburbs of Minneapolis, the rural farmlands of Wisconsin,…
The Future Has Poetry: “How I Tell You I Love You When All Hope Is Lost” by Jeneva Stone

Displaced air arrives by force as the metro rushes the station. Your hand pressed to the small of my back and dim lights up my spine brighten north. Greens tied with a pink ribbon. Narrative hallway with endless doors without a knob or dial. Breath visible and there! grace notes ensue. greens tied with a…