To read this brief in Dari/Farsi, click here.
To read this brief in Pashto, click here.
Background:
Comma Press is a not-for-profit UK publishing house that specialises in short stories and in commissioning anthologies around very specific themes (sometimes quite unusual themes, with challenging briefs). This book will be part of an existing series of speculative fiction anthologies centering around writers from Palestine, Iraq, Kurdistan, Egypt, Iran, and elsewhere. You can read more about the series here: https://commapress.co.uk/series/futures-past
This brief:
To write a short story set Afghanistan in the year 2101 – a century after the U.S. invasion – as a means of imagining what Afghanistan’s future might look like.
In light of the United States’ catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, the three years of Taliban rule that have perpetuated and intensified injustices of the past decades, the ongoing climate realities of harsh winters, floods and earthquakes, and the mass expulsion of millions of refugees from Pakistan and Iran since 2023, we’re inviting writers to imagine what kind of future Afghanistan might have, with short stories set a century after the invasion of October 7, 2001.
Despite the overwhelming challenges of the present, we feel it is necessary to keep looking at, or imagining the future and the wider, historical picture. We choose this focus on the future as a way of imagining a multitude of possibilities for Afghanistan and its people, and of exploring pressing contemporary and historical struggles in Afghanistan through the lens of fiction set in the future – far enough that the possibilities are vast, and near enough that they are within our reach.
The stories will be for an anthology titled Afghanistan +100, which will ask a dozen Afghan authors (both living inside of Afghanistan and in diaspora) to imagine life in Afghanistan in the year 2101. Specifically, we invite you to write about the date October 7, 2101 – 100 years from the advent of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and 76 years from the present moment.
On October 7, 2001, the U.S. launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan. The ground invasion also marked the first time in history that modern drones were used in warfare. As time has progressed, the very tools of collective punishment first tested on the people of Afghanistan and Iraq have found new life in Palestine, now deployed with “innovations” that only deepen their destructive impact. In these places, drones continue to fly, while perversion of technological progress allows a dehumanizing AI to decide who lives and who dies. In our present moment, the reverberations of this history are having a profound impact.
In considering a future from this departure point in the past, authors are invited to write short stories set in the year 2101 which explore different outcomes for Afghanistan and for its people, positive and negative. Writers may choose to explore and predict long-term consequences of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, or to more broadly use the year 2101 – one year into the turn of the 22nd century – as the canvas for exploration of other events and themes of Afghanistan’s history. You can replay real moments of the past in an allegorical future, imagine a deepening of current trends and challenges, or imagine a completely new turn of events. The stories must be speculative in nature and set in the future but can occupy a wide range of literary styles and sub-genres. We welcome hybrid forms and innovative narratives that defy conventional categorization.
The goal of this future-setting — as editor Basma Ghalayini said of this series’ inaugural Palestine +100 — is to allow authors “license to re-imagine, re-configure, and re-interrogate the present” moment. In responding to this brief, we invite you all to consider and envision themes of:
We honor being in the lineage of future dreamers, and our work stands on the larger legacy of Afrofuturism. Central to this vision is our commitment to welcome a multitude of perspectives, politics, and languages into the collection. We are particularly eager to hear from writers from vulnerable and marginalized communities.
We also recognize the limitations of imagining the future, especially in a world already teetering on the edge of apocalypse. Reimagining history can be particularly fraught for communities with contested pasts. We welcome work that engages and honors this tension, and we invite writers to turn this prompt on its head, use their submission to critique the notion of futurity, or press the limits of the speculative genre.
If you have any questions or ideas you would like to tease out, you’re welcome to contact the edition editors, Mina and Alex, at afghanistanplus100@protonmail.com.
Writers of selected submissions will be compensated.
Summary
Deadline: Stories must be sent by 1 May, 2025. We welcome submissions in any language. Submissions must be exclusively for this solicitation and not published or submitted for publication elsewhere.
Length: Stories should be between 2000 and 6000 words in Latin, or between 1800 and 5400 Perso-Arabic characters.
Compensation for selection: ￡300.
Edition editors: Mina Jawad & Alexandra Millatmal.
Series editors: Ra Page & David Sue.
To be published: Spring 2026.
How to Submit
Please send your submission as an email attachment with the subject line “Submission” to afghanistanplus100@protonmail.com. Please also include (in the body of email or separate attachment) a short biography.
FAQS
1. Why the focus on futurism?
Simply put: to insist on our existence in the future, and to understand the present with new perspective.
2. What if I’ve never read any science or speculative fiction before, let alone written it?
Don’t be disheartened! Bringing new ideas and fresh perspectives to the genre is one of the key goals of this project. Our working definitions of the overarching genres of the anthology are as follows:
These genres contain a multitude of sub-genres including utopia, dystopia, slipstream, alternate history, magical realism, djinn myths, horror, and others.
If you do want to learn more, quickly, sometimes you can understand some of the most effective tools of science fiction by watching film or TV adaptations, especially if you don’t have access to original novels and short stories. A non-exhaustive list of titles we recommend: FX’s Kindred (adapted from Octavia Butler’s novel of the same name), Arrival (adapted from Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”), Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, John Carpenter’s The Thing, HBO’s Lovecraft Country, and Marvel’s Black Panther.
3. What if I can’t imagine a different, future Afghanistan, because there is so little sign of anything ever changing?
That can be one of the most memorable applications of science fiction, to show how things are now but with the veneer of being set in the future. By projecting a problem of the present day into the future, we can see it in a different context and new light. This kind of science fiction – that warns about things staying the same or getting worse – can shock the reader more than the kind of science fiction that merely predicts a completely different future in which current problems have all been solved.
Speculative fiction can be a continuation into the future of issues Afghanistan is struggling with in the present or has struggled with in the past. What happens when these problems persist, but technology advances or climate safety continues to decline? The point of this application of the speculative isn’t necessarily to offer hope, but to invite the reader to reconsider what is unfolding in the present.
Of course, it’s also possible to think about how things might improve in Afghanistan, and what efforts it might take to bring about change. Rarely is change entirely bad or entirely good. Change doesn’t necessarily mean a better Afghanistan or a worse one – simply a different one. What happens when you explore a future Afghanistan thinking of the price of change, what it costs to put into action, and what issues fail to be addressed by change?
4. What if I want to explore a different part of history, not the U.S. strike or invasion, in my version of the future?
That’s absolutely fine, and even encouraged! Afghan history certainly didn’t start with its relationship with the U.S. and there are many moments in its history that readers would benefit from understanding. The only rule is that your story must be set in the year 2101.
We debated centering the collection on a date that binds Afghanistan to the imperial violence of the United States, but were struck by the undeniable, far-reaching impacts of that violence in the present moment. We think, of course, of Palestine and of Gaza. We choose this date to honor the fact that – even in a future where these atrocities may have never come to pass – our futures, liberations, and survival are intertwined in one another.
5. Can I use a pseudonym in case my work is politically sensitive?
Yes, absolutely. We expect some writers to use pseudonyms. Also, separately, if you wish to use your real name, we can also guarantee that your name won't appear online ever (if you wish), so only people who have a physical copy of the book in their hands will ever see your name.
We are committed to working with authors across varying circumstances. If you have any other concerns about safety or anonymity that are not addressed in this brief, please reach out to us at afghanistanplus100@protonmail.com.
6. What languages are you looking for?
Any: Farsi/Dari, Pashto, Uzbek, Turkmen, English, any European language, and any other language not specifically listed here. We expect about half of selected submissions to be written in a language other than English.
We will arrange translation through a mixture of grant funding and communal translation, inspired by the Palestinian Youth Movement’s recent translation of the Trinity of Fundamentals.
7. When can I expect to be notified whether my submission was selected?
We plan to notify all those who submitted by 1 July, 2025.
8. Who are Mina and Alex?
Alexandra Millatmal is a writer and software engineer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her writing has appeared in The Margins, What is Afghan Punk Rock, Anyway?, Koukash Review, and elsewhere. Most recently, she published a series of erasure poems in the print anthology accompanying the 2023 Worth Ryder Art Gallery’s exhibition “Emergenc(y): Afghan Lives Beyond the Forever War”. Lately, Alex’s creative work has orbited around themes of: conflict, reconciliation, and liberatory politics in intimate relationships; translation; memory; and the ethics of futurity. Most importantly, she is a proud older sister.
Mina Jawad is a writer based in Berlin. Her work spans prose, satire, political commentary and performance-based discourse, continually challenging and transcending the conventional boundaries of academic, journalistic, and artistic fields. In addition to her writing, she teaches in a variety of academic and non-academic settings. A former columnist for dis:orient Magazine, her play Shar-e-Naw in Berlin (New Evil in Berlin) is part of her work in theater.
