Where to submit near-future sci-fi, or climate fiction, short stories?

HELP!

I've written a fair few near-future Sci-fi shorts, but as yet have failed to get anything published.

All my rejects have been generic emails or a single sentence so it's hard to know what to improve, but I suspect at least part of my problem has been that my stuff isn't always fully in the sci-fi rhelm: It's kind of Black Mirror like, and more recently is moving in the climate fiction direction, so set in the mid- to late-2000s.

Does anyone have suggestions of places to sumbit these kind of shorts?

in scifiwritingby anotherhomosapian

84%

2.0y

brain_escapist

2.0y

How short are the "shorts" (word count)?

Which publications have you tried already?

Have you had anyone else critique your work before submitting it?

anotherhomosapian

2.0y

Sorry it took me so long to reply to these, rough few weeks...

Anyway, by short I mean about 3-7k words

I've tried the list below (perhaps more I've forgotten), a few of them multiple times, with different stories of course

I've had feedback from various friends and I used to use Scribophile frequently, which meant perhaps three people's feedback on a draft and 2-3 rounds of that. A lot of my feedback on there was good. Feedback from my friends was good but that's relatively meaningless, especially as they are almost all British...

Escape Pod
Terraform
Asimovs
Apex
Interzone
Big Echo
Strange Horizons
Clarks World
Lightspeed

RayPDaleyCovUK

2.0y

Get yourself a free account on Submission Grinder, list your stories & use their search engine by genre looking for SF. There are some CliFi specific markets knocking about but I can't recall their names off the top of my head.

anotherhomosapian

2.0y

Thanks for that, I've used the site some time back, but hadn't thought to check it for CilFi

shadowmind0770

2.0y

Post them on sites like Royal Road.

You can also publish an anthology or something if the stories are short enough. If you have a lot of them divide them into volumes.

Self publishing to Amazon is very possible and quite easy once you get past the formatting.

anotherhomosapian

2.0y

Thanks for the RR tip, I'd never heard of it so will take a proper look

I am building towards an anthology as things are; 6 shorts of 3-7k words and a couple of flash that are 1.5k. Not sure what I'd do with it though, I'd never considered going to a publisher/agent with a pile of stories, although I'd thought of just doing the Amazon route

timetoscience

2.0y

If any of them are near-term and based on carbon capture, sequestration, or abatement let me know! As a cli-fi author, I’m directly connected with an anthology publishing this November.

anotherhomosapian

2.0y

Ah! Well, I have a couple, of cli-fi now, one only just finished that needs some work

Neither are about capture or sequestration specifically

The first is largely a story about adaptation and inequality and failed mitigation

The second is about a neurolink-inspired technology in a seemingly utopian, semi-socialist, ecologically empathic society, where climate crisis comes to form the backgound to a sharply divided world

I'm a climate researcher myself, and in a sense, the two stories could be seen to exist within two of the five socio-economic scenarios used by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change)

clayhouse69

2.0y

Alias_The_J

2.0y

u/clayhouse69 Your reply was cut off.

You might try posting some of them to forums with creative writing sections, such as SpaceBattles, and then soliciting feedback. Alternatively, there are several 'help this author' websites that could get you a beta reader.
Heck, some parts of Reddit could even qualify; I doubt that many would complain if you posted a short story to r/solarpunk so long as it was on theme.

anotherhomosapian

2.0y

Thanks, I was using Scribophile for a while, which seems a nice community, but may be too nice for constructive feedback, I don't know...

I used the Destructive Readers sub once, never went back; the critics I had seemed to revel in it a little too much (although to be fair what I put up was shoddy as hell)

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