Trenchcoats, Towers and Trolls: Cyberpunk Fairy Tales
For this, the third installment of Punked Up Fairy Tales, we are excited to mash the world of cyberpunk together with fairy tales and see what sort of magic results. Embracing the high-tech/low-life aspect of cyberpunk will give these stories both the sleek coolness of futuristic technology and the grittiness of traditional fairy tales.
Give me a story of Rapunzel trapped in a tower of circuits rather than stones, of trolls who live under bridges as well as those who do their work behind a keyboard — or whatever passes for a keyboard in the future. What if Snow White was a computer and the apple a virus? What if Hansel and Gretel were hackers following digital breadcrumbs? Or Cinderella was a program who must stop running by midnight or else?
Don’t rely exclusively on imaginative technology to make your story stand out in a crowd — make sure you nail all the other important parts of a story as well. Plot. Character. Setting. You know the list.
Original fairy tales are welcome, as are retellings. If you choose to retell a familiar favourite, make sure your story offers something new and interesting. I’d rather see stories that reflect the long history of fairy tales as social commentary than those which simply tell the same story with a different setting.
I am excited to read stories set all over this or other worlds, and would love to see ‘Own Voices’ stories and, as always, welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds (including, but not limited to, race, color, religion, gender/gender expression, age, disability, and national origin). Further, I love to see a diverse collection when it comes to which fairy tales are represented, but also the races, genders and sexualities of the characters within them.
Open for Submissions: February 1 – 28, 2021
Expected Publication: 2022
Story Length: up to 7,500 words
Payment: $0.01 per word + contributor copy
Simultaneous submissions = okay. Multiple submissions = no.
I’ll have a Submittable link for submissions closer to the time they open.
