Canterbury 2100 is still open for submissions. The submission period has been extended because haven’t yet received enough of the right kind of stories to fill the anthology. We are now aiming for a launch date of Conflux, October 2008. The full submission guidelines are here, but here is the gist of it:

Canterbury 2100 will be a series of short stories linked by a common framework. Envisioned as a riff off of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from fourteenth century England, the individual stories will be narrated by individual members of a disparate group of travelers on a pilgrimage of sorts to Canterbury. However, for our purposes it will be the Canterbury of 2108, and the stories need to reflect that.

The premise of the collection suggests that these are stories told verbally, to pass the time on a long trip.

The stories should reflect the society which created them. Today’s readers learn about C14th England by reading the fiction of the time, and reconstructing the people who created and appreciated it. Canterbury 2100 allows the same kind of experience of an imaginary future society. We aim to create for readers the sense of place and time behind the stories. Creating that sense of a “real-history world” by imagining and writing the fiction of a shared imaginary setting, represents the real challenge to the writers taking part.

In other words, the stories need to represent not exactly the ‘true future history’, but the stuff which the people of that imaginary future history would like to believe in. It bears the same relationship to our collective imaginary future that present-day TV series and novels and movies do to our present-day real world, and it’s immediate past.

We’re interested in just about any kind of story, because the nature of the setting will instantly make it science fiction. You want to write a romance? Fine. As long as it can believably be a romance that might be told for amusement by a traveler in Canterbury 2100. Same with horror, adventure, and just about any other genre you care to name. I can see where a mythic retelling of Gilligan’s Island might work beautifully, for example — reflecting a culture in which the Gilligan stories have passed into oral tradition and legend. Way-out post-humanism? Sure: in a difficult, post-eco-disaster world, people might well fear human/machine weapons, or long for the indestructibility of a downloaded life.

Canterbury 2100 seeks submissions from Australian and New Zealand authors until May 2008. Standard manuscript formatting applies. Payment offered: AUS $30 plus a copy of the anthology. Email your submissions as .rtf or .doc files to Dirk Flinthart at: canterbury2100 at gmail.com

For more information, check out the guidelines in full here. Feel free to bug Dirk if you have an idea you’re not sure about.