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.

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…
Hybrid Piece from the Future: “Genetic Engineering Demonstration Gone Wrong” by Bethany Jarmul

No one believed umbrellas could be grown in fields, could open their faces to the firmament like foxgloves. But I raised the curtain and revealed—to gasps of delight—a wonderful waterproof leaf-canopy with sturdy vine-shaft and real root-handle. What luck! I held it over a child’s head just as the rain roused. The crowd cheered, applauded.…
“There Is News Along the Ohio River”: Four Hybrid Pieces from the Future by Beth Gilstrap

XVII. There is news along the Ohio river: a young man has tied his loosening jeans up with twine and huddles into his denim jacket, a bird peeking out of a nest, but the fabric may as well be a brittle photograph wet and dried a hundred times before he taped it over the crack in…
Poetry from The Future: “Flood Warning” by Constance Clark

It is incredibly sad Rainwater sits on top of concave dirtdressed in a ripples of amusement Steel raindrops crushed cattails at pondsideand made them learn to swim last night Nowhere Sunna, or Khepri,Amaterasu, or Ra to blot the earth The glistening fern bow, soaked,spilling stardust guts We stare with no replystanding in purple rubber boots…
The Future Has Poetry: “The Year of the Buzzard” by Bray McDonald

It was the Year of the Buzzard, and everything was dying not to die.The last of the clinging leaves had fallen,and the trees were stark with despair.The sky could only croak at dawn.Its throat was clogged, and its eyes itchedwith the dusty and rusty particlesthat rained across the horizon, and bloated the suninto a stunted…