What happens when you hold someone’s gaze—really hold it? An artist and an inventor try to recreate that experience in Sofia Samatar’s Future Tense Fiction story. Absorbed in detail and technicalities, they neglect a more fundamental question: Will they be ready to see what their technology reflects back to them?
How does emotion travel through our eyes? In his response to Sofia Samatar’s story, video game designer Will Hellwarth shares his quest to create a narrative world that responds to a player’s blink.
Response
In an alternative legal system built on the concept of “an eye for an eye,” if you commit a crime, your punishment is that someday a network of state agents will perpetrate the same crime against you. These ministers, themselves survivors of violence, follow the principle of “commensurate severity.” When one such minister is assigned to a kidnapping case, she’s forced to determine what justice really looks like.
What does it mean for a punishment to truly fit a crime? A post-conviction attorney explores the limits of a criminal legal system built on retribution.
Response
Professor, medievalist, and writer Erin K. Wagner discusses “The Middle,” her August 2025 short story for Future Tense Fiction.
In Margrét Helgadóttir’s “Tunnel Fever,” an isolated roadside bar buried in a vast network of tunnels on the floor of the Arctic Ocean is staffed by a claustrophobic waitress who dreams of life above the surface. When a pair of outlaws tries to rob the bar, its patrons and employees are forced to work together […]
