Following an April event (LessWrong announcement post) where we made a $500 award to Ken Liu's "Good Stories", the "Art of the Near Future" project is organizing a second event October 15th in Brooklyn (RSVP) where we'll award:

• $250 for the best short fiction (<10,000 words) published between April and October 2025 that imagines life in our near future world, the world a few months to a few years from now.
• $250 for the best ‘Fragment of the Future’ (<1,000 words), an original mini-story imagining an encounter, emotion, or strand of life in our near future that is submitted by its author for this project.
• $100 for whoever first refers the winning piece of short fiction

I thought the LessWrong community might find it interesting and relevant as we think about broader ways to help people think about the future and imagine ways it could be different. I'm going to review recent fiction posted on LessWrong, but please do recommend pieces from here or elsewhere.

** How to participate **

Go to artnearfuture.world to 

• Submit your flash fiction fragment (by October 10th)
• Recommend a short story (by October 10th)

And thanks for passing this along to anyone you think might be interested.

(I posted a call in July for submissions - and thanks to those who did - and those early submissions are being rolled over into consideration for this October event)

** Motivation **

1. The world can change very quickly and it may change especially quickly in the coming years.
2. Art is an especially powerful way to help communities and the broader public imagine and think through possible futures.
3. While of course there is a rich tradition of science fiction writing and movies, I think short form fiction writing is an ideal and undersupported form of art for imagining the near future world. Short form fiction writing can respond to a quickly changing present, a timeline on which movies or TV shows or novels can’t keep up.
4. Short form fiction writing (and especially even briefer flash fiction) can be broadly made. It can catch an experience, an emotion, a feeling of the future, a quick look around the bend. Short form fiction writing can encourage broader participation, as for example in @Tenoke's post here and @Richard_Ngo’s writing here.
5. Current gaps: In general, there is not much support or celebration of short-form fiction writing. And what short-form fiction exists is often fragmented across the web. And artistic awards proceed on an annual calendar (at best), so there is a further lag in the timeliness of their celebration.
6. A prize celebration focused on short stories and flash fiction set in our our near future world, the world a few months to a few years from now, can help recognize and encourage art that plays with the possible threads of the near future. It could bring to broader life some of the concerns around AI, etc. of LW and related communities.
7. And doing that multiple times a year can help encourage art staying up to date in its imagination. That frequent pace follows the example of other fast-moving grant programs (like Fast Grants during COVID) and helps build further community.