We are looking for Short Stories (1000-10,000 words), speculative features to 3000 words, speculative news (100-800 words) which will mould the future we are creating.

In early issues the scope of your story is wide open to your own interpretation of what the year 2401 will be like, but once published these stories will become a part of the ‘history’ which will shape all future issues. 

Contributors should familiarize themselves with several issues in order to avoid contradicting stories which have already been published. 

After just 4 issues we have begun to create a future, with a history as complex as that found in either Star Trek or Babylon 5. But do not be misled by those programmes. In Colonies there are no warp drives , no transporters, and no jump gate technology. Mankind has yet to voyage beyond the limits of our own solar system, except for a few deep space probes and space stations.(although there’s no stopping one or two alien races stopping off here for one reason or another). 

All written work should be submitted on spec after careful study of the stories already published.  Every day we are offered stories and scripts by people who have never even read one of our stories.  Here is the best tip available; if you wrote the story before you heard about Colonies then it probably will not be right for us.  

Artwork should be submitted as samples from which artists can be commissioned to produce work specifically targeted to a particular story. 

Colonies has been designed to produce the sort of stories which might one day form the basis of a new TV epic. It is accompanied and promoted by a web site where the stories, environments and characters created within its pages can be explored and experienced by a world wide audience.
 
 

Aug 20 2000: Bookface.com the online bookseller owned by Timewarner has selected Fiona Avery's The Bards series of stories from Colonies to be featured on their website.
 
 

John Dunne -Editor

 
Postal Submissions should be sent to:
14 Honor Avenue, Goldthorn Park,Wolverhampton WV4 5HH. UK 

"If I had a flower for every 
time I thought of Earth,
I could walk in the first 
garden centre on Mars"--
       Deep belt surveyor
 

"A comet flies beside us like a sunbeam, And for a brief moment its glory and beauty belongs to our world.  But then it flies on again, and though we wish it could have stayed, we feel so lucky to have seen it."
       On the debate about saving Halley's comet
 

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"Let me always remember the refreshing gift of 
a walk in natural gravity,
a day by the sea,           
a breath of real air."       
      ... From a sermon delivered at the Church of the Rock
 

"A single sunbeam is enough to drive away  sorrows on Pluto."...
Governor of Pluto's penal colony
 

"And what is a Belter?  A Colonist whose virtues have not been discovered."...
Sign over the bar at the Rooks Branch Tavern