Afghanistan +100: Call for Submissions Reopened
New Deadline: 15 October, 2025
Dear writers,
We are reopening submissions for Afghanistan +100, our anthology of speculative fiction set in the year 2101 and written by Afghan authors — both within Afghanistan and in diaspora. Those who previously submitted are welcome to send new work, and we warmly invite first-time submitters to join us. Our detailed original brief — including FAQs — remains available at the links below:
If you have any questions not addressed by the brief or FAQs you’re welcome to contact the edition editors, Mina and Alex, at afghanistanplus100@protonmail.com.
Writers of selected submissions will be compensated.
What We’re Looking For
New, specially written stories set Afghanistan in the year 2101 – a century after the U.S. invasion – imagining what Afghanistan’s future might look like.
When we talk about futurism in storytelling, we don’t just mean that the story takes place in the future or has a future date slapped on it. What we’re really looking for is a narrative that imagines what life in that future looks like — how people live, think, relate, resist, dream, survive. It’s about building a lived-in future world in which a story unfolds, not just reflecting on the world from the past tense.
Instead of explaining history, craft a sensory present.
❌ “After the famine of 2063, everyone was required to wear biofilters.”
✅ “Sumayya adjusted the slim band on her neck; every morning it pinched harder before purifying the smog.”
❌ “The oceans rose and Europe fell into chaos.”
✅ “Elias folded the map of drowned Paris and tucked it into the canoe’s waterproof satchel.”
Let readers draw their own conclusions. Instead of moralizing, let readers wrestle with ambiguity.
❌ “The ruthless elite exploited the working poor.”
✅ “Dr. Samadi lit a candle before entering the tribunal room. Her brother’s sentence was already printed on the screen.”
Immerse us from the first line, and try to stay in that moment. Let the world reveal itself through action, not explanation.
❌ “In 2101, climate change had reshaped the entire continent.”
✅ “The concrete hissed beneath her feet. Heat rising like breath from the Earth’s cracked lungs."
❌ Open the story with paragraphs of political backstory
✅ “We weren’t supposed to be outside. The Front had controlled this road for months and we knew the rhythm of their regular patrols.”
Trust your readers! You don’t need to explain every piece of technology or every historical event. Imagine that someone is already living in the future of Afghanistan.
❌ Explaining a character’s solar caravan with two pages of technical specs
✅ “The trailer’s petals opened with the sunrise, filling the battery just enough for tea.”
DOs:
DON’Ts:
Other things we’re not keen on:
How to Submit
Deadline: Stories must be submitted via this form by 15 October, 2025.
Length: 2000-6000 words (Latin) / 1800-5400 characters (Perso-Arabic)
We welcome submissions in any language. Submissions must be exclusively for this solicitation and not published or submitted for publication elsewhere.
For those resubmitting after the first open call: we will only ask for revisions of previously-submitted stories directly and explicitly by email to individual authors. We ask all others for stories from scratch.
A Note on Why We’re Reopening
We were thrilled to receive submissions to our initial call for stories across multiple languages — Dari, Pashto, English, and others — but they largely did not contain the immersive future worlds we seek. This has prompted us to reflect on our process and try to communicate more clearly about what collaborative speculative futurism means in practice.
First, our responsibilities to you as editors: Our original brief was perhaps too lengthy, and the submission window too aggressive. We recognize that futurism — while historically a mode of resistance for other marginalized communities — is relatively new terrain in Afghan literary traditions. We also understand the profound difficulty of imagining futures when the present holds such overwhelming suffering. What does it mean to project forward when our survival in the now demands everything? We know the weight of the present makes imagination sometimes feel impossible.
Despite these challenges, we believe in your — our — capacity to imagine Afghanistan beyond the present, and the importance of this exercise for our future.
So, we are reopening our call to clarify what we are looking for, provide some guidance, and offer an extended application window. We also plan to host open video calls with questions and feedback in the coming months — details to follow.
With hope and love,
Alex & Mina
