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.

The Future by (∀/non i/U): “UX-000-111 (Oxygen),” from a larger work in progress called U/X

“UX-000-111″ is from a larger work in progress called U/X, about the author’s (∀/non i/U) User eXperience w/ the fundamental elements + how we forever live in the interface of the senses, under the spell of the “man-maid” objects we think we make when in fact they make us make them. *Ed.’s Note: click images to…
Three Poems Exclusively from Jay Halsey’s Multi-Form Collection Barely Half in an Awkward Line

Barely Half in an Awkward Line weaves a twelve-year span of Jay Halsey’s photography, poems, short stories, and essays. Photos featuring desolate rural and urban landscapes, thought provoking and oftentimes bizarre portraits of masked subjects, and abandoned homes, alongside written themes involving poverty, chemical abuse, homelessness, violence, the ruling class versus the working class, and…
Fox Henry Frazier: Three Mermaid Poems from The Future

Silver-Eyed Lilínabalén and Adam of the Red Soil Shared the First Pull & Fall of Earthly Promise By land, I saw his core transformedin daily toil russet-smudged ordained mortal scorch iron stains & aches,known, he said, to man alone. We soaked in evening glow, orange orb dippingpast horizon. Lowering home. Night would rinse him clean,…
The Future: “HolyLand, USA,” a short story by Ron Burch

We’re having trouble getting the Red Sea to part, and my boss is flipping out. It’s our highlight and finale. Written about across the country. Our most expensive exhibit, oh yeah. Through an expanse of dirt, our Pilgrims approach the ride, an outside body of water. The water’s resting on the surface, and it looks…
Three Poems from The Future: Josh Fomon

Our human shores Absence makes of me a skeletal transmission. A future silence hummed into the ether. In a fog of salt, the marsh blesses the morning. Reflects all our history, our inhuman attempt at living, the sentimental idea of power. We see nothing until it reveals itself or we seek out how far we…
“Palmerland: BNA’s Ellis Island,” a short comic from The Future by Angus Woodward

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Angus Woodward was raised by southerners in the Midwest and moved to Louisiana half a lifetime ago. His books of fiction are Down at the End of the River, Americanisation, and Oily. His comics have appeared recently in Hobart, Slag Glass City, Shenandoah, Split Rock Review, and elsewhere. “Palmerland: BNA’s…
John-Michael Bloomquist: Three Father Nescio Poems from The Future

Father Nescio and the Ark of the Future The lift was a mile-long throat up to the scorched surface of the Earth. The phlegm-yellow sky hacked thunder and spat lightning around the Ark— a shimmering peanut of mercury larger than the New York skyline sitting in the vaporized seabed— a coral graveyard bleached like an albino…
“Dad’s House,” a short story from The Future by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

I go to the café with my machine, but I’m followed by a smell. No one else around seems to be bothered by it, and though it’s intense, acrid, sour, like my dad’s dirty toothbrush (how could he have kissed our mother after shoving that thing in his mouth?), I make myself get used to…
Six Micros from The Future: Matt Leibel

Out of Office Jeff wrote an out-of-office email: “Off to the future, back Wednesday the 21st.” Of course, in the future, he didn’t have this job—no one had jobs. Everything was automated and people just sat around thinking, dreaming, playing videogames. He liked this, so he never returned, never invented the systems that made this…