2034: Writing Rochester's Futures

Where will you be in 2034?

I noticed one other idle man. He carried a rifle on his shoulder and a powder horn across his breast, and appeared to stare about him with confused wonder, as if, while he was listening to the wind among the forest boughs, the hum and bustle of an instantaneous city had surrounded him.
—"Rochester," Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)

In 1808, a single mill on the banks of the Genesee River ground flour for a handful of settlers. A bare few years later that tranquility was shattered when the Erie Canal brought in the world, and a sprawl of 1300 homes along both banks became America's first boomtown. Water and power, industry and creativity metamorphosed a swampy village into a powerhouse that incorporated as the City of Rochester in 1834.

Today, in 2008, the year 2034 beckons as another milestone. That future is near enough that most people alive today will be able to greet Rochester's Bicentennial, yet far enough that changes may stagger our perceptions of community, culture, technology, and perhaps the very essence of what it means to be human.

Rochester, the Greater Rochester area, Western New York, the Great Lakes, the world, will be different, transformed, perhaps unrecognizable. Show us how.

The Rochester Speculative Literature Association (R-SPEC) invites your most inspired visions of Rochester's tomorrow for an anthology of speculative literature to be published in Fall 2008.

Submission Guidelines

We are no longer accepting submissions. Our selection process is complete, and we expect to be in print before the end of November.