CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! Futures: A Science Fiction Chapbook Series

*** UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 10, 2018 ***

Thank you to everyone who submitted! We emailed folks on Friday, December 7, 2018 to announce that we’ve made our final selections. If you did not receive that email, please check your spam folder to see if it’s there, as none of the emails we sent have bounced back. If you still can’t find it, please feel free to politely query and we will respond promptly.

We appreciate all of your submissions and hope that you will continue to follow the project.

Radix Media is proud to present the next project in our publishing program: Futures, a series of short stories that will explore critical contemporary issues and their human ramifications in a science fiction setting.

What would climate change look like in the future? What about policing? Labor issues? Immigration? The human cost of technology?

By using science fiction as a means through which to unpack these issues, we hope that the stories will allow for a better understanding of our world and give us more tools in our struggle to make it better.

We are looking for unpublished short stories that could be described as “literary science fiction.” The work should be about more than just rayguns and spaceships. (But there’s nothing wrong with those things!) They should explore the human element of science fiction, ask tough questions, and examine what it would mean to be alive in a future that is yet unwritten. We believe that good science fiction reflects the dreams and nightmares of the present day.

Pieces should adhere to the following guidelines:

Cover Letter

Please submit a cover letter with your submission to submissions@radixmedia.org, listing:

• Your contact information
• The title, word count, and a summary of the submission
• If you have been published in any major publications or won any awards
• Any association or relationship with a worker at Radix Media or a guest editor

Manuscript Guidelines

• Between 5,000 and 10,000 words
• Typed, double-spaced pages
• Numbered pages
• Attach your submission as a .DOCX file. No .DOC or PDF files. Deadline is September 1, 2018.

Contributors to Futures will be paid at the rate of $0.06 per word. Payment for finished pieces will be issued within 30 days of publication.

If you are a person of color, queer, trans, disabled, or any combination of these, we would especially love to hear from you.

Please submit your story to submissions@radixmedia.org by September 1, 2018.

Radix Media is no ordinary publisher; we print all of our titles ourselves at our commercial print shop in Brooklyn, New York. Our intimate knowledge of the printing process means that we make choices based on what’s right for the project, not what’s cheapest. This ensures that the aesthetic is perfectly aligned with the content. We often combine offset lithography, letterpress printing, and foil stamping in our books, making each copy an object of art that has passed through our fingers at every stage of its life.

The stories featured in the Futures chapbook series will be treated in the exact same manner, and will be wonderful sights to behold as well as to read. Additionally, we will collect the first five stories into a beautiful boxed set volume with the same care and attention given to each individual chapbook.

We are New York City’s only worker-owned, union print shop and publisher. The first title in our publishing program, AFTERMATH: Explorations of Loss & Grief, was published in April 2018 and received five stars from Foreword Reviews.

Our name comes from the Latin root of the word radical, meaning to get to the root. We stay true to this concept by publishing stories that get to the root of the human experience.

Radix Media publishes stories that reflect our varied experiences. We build a platform for voices that often go unheard, and share work that explores the nuances of life and asks readers to step outside of their own perspective. Because of our commitment to building a more just world, we prioritize the voices of marginalized communities.