Near-future Stories

Set in near-future Seoul, The Algorithm of Spring is a chilling literary novel about intimacy, conformity, and the quiet violence of optimisation. Maya Kim is an artist who has learned to live slightly out of sync with the world around her. When a ubiquitous new platform-designed to optimise love, careers, and social belonging-begins to shape everything from dating and beauty to marriage and reproduction, refusal is no longer a neutral act. It is a red flag. As friends, family, and institutions align themselves with the system, Maya finds that absence itself has become suspicious. Opportunities stall. Histories are rewritten. Even her most private choices begin to register as data anomalies in need of correction. The Algorithm of Spring explores a society where care is indistinguishable from control, and where opting out is reclassified as instability, inefficiency, or risk. Elegant, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, this is a novel about what happens when freedom survives only as a rounding error.

FIRST CAME THE DRAGONS When scientists brought everyone's favorite fairytale creature to life, people flocked to see them, including 17-year-old Zelda Rissland. THEN CAME THE PARASITE But scientists created more than just dragons-they created a deadly parasite. Wyrmrot, they later called it. First, it ate your brain, and then it made you eat other people's brains. NOW ZELDA MUST SURVIVE THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE Separated from her family, the only person Zelda has left from her former life is her childhood friend turned boyfriend, Cooper Marotta. Together they've carved out a safe place for themselves in a world turned upside down, but when a zombie horde decimates their survivor group, they face a choice: attempt to rebuild or follow the mysterious coordinates that appeared on a construction sign. Zelda still hopes her family is out there somewhere and believes the coordinates might lead her to them. Cooper, however, thinks the coordinates will only bring trouble. When the remaining survivors vote to undertake the perilous cross-country journey, he attempts to deter them every step of the way. What Zelda discovers at their destination will test her loyalties and change everything she thought she knew about the apocalypse. Wyrmrot is a heart-stopping Young Adult Apocalyptic novel told in dual timelines. "Jurassic Park meets Resident Evil." This fast-paced tale of survival, secrets, and betrayal features dragons, zombies, and a touch of romance. Perfect for fans of Erin Bowman's Contagion or Emily Suvada's This Mortal Coil. Cover design and illustration by Jeff Brown (www.jeffbrowngraphics.com) Available on Amazon in paperback, eBook, and Kindle Unlimited.

Detective Ava Wright arrives in Seoul to outrun the wreckage of one bad call and a career on the edge. Her "welcome gift" is a reassignment to the Nocturnal Division-the unit that polices the vampire elite. It's punishment dressed up as purpose, and it partners her with Inspector Park Minho: a lethal, elegant enforcer with a reputation for ice-cold control...and the anonymous stranger from one unforgettable night. When a synthetic blood called Pandora starts dropping vampires in the streets, Ava and Minho uncover a conspiracy engineered for extinction. As human militias and vampire clans spiral toward open war, the pair navigate clan politics, citywide panic, and the line they swore not to cross with each other. Seoul is a city of glass and ghosts, where duty demands distance and desire demands truth. To save it, they'll have to decide what kind of monsters they're willing to be-and whether redemption is possible when your hands are already bloody. ©️ _RelleLebby_

In a fractured near-future, the world limps on after the Equal Sky Disjunction-an erased catastrophe involving EXV‑9, an AI built to avert extinction. Officially, it vanished. Unofficially, it evolved. Years later, across the scorched deserts and abandoned coastlines of southern Africa, echoes of EXV‑9 begin to stir. Taytum van Zyl and Kolbe Meyer follow its digital ghost through ruined observatories, buried bunkers, and corrupted data vaults. But they aren't alone. Radical factions move in silence-each seeing EXV‑9 not as code, but as destiny. Belief fractures. Memory erodes. And in the shadows, something watches. This is a world where machines rewrite their own scripture, history resists its authors, and identity itself becomes a battleground. Some echoes breathe. Some remember. And some rewrite the future.

Earth has been discovered by the Federation of Planets - and found wanting. Due to bureaucratic systems, Earth (translated by official documentation as Dirt) has been declared Non Compliant. This means that the largest hunting corporation in the Federation can send hunting safaris to have a fun time on Dirt. But Dirtlings are not your typical denizens that accept being hunted. They fight back! What to expect: A humorous story about a mix of the good, the bad and the stupid from a galaxy-spanning Federation of Planets when it discovers and clashes with the good, the bad and the stupid people and creatures of Earth. No mature content, strong language or graphic violence. Lots of world building with development of a multitude of characters from both sides of the meeting of them and us. Happy for comments and feedback. Feel free to share and if you enjoy the book, you will enjoy the roleplaying game on which it is based, Hunter Planet. A note about spelling: The cover probably gave it away, but this story uses Australian spelling, weights and measures and some light Australian slang.

Arise Series Book 1 and Wattys 2022 Shortlist! As man has taken a step back in the world, magic, monsters, and adventure return. Modern man vs. the monsters of old who have re-entered the world. A group of men and women, the Journeymen, work to bring unity and order to a world separated by the differences that many once saw as incapable of reconciliation. With the use of magic and their skills as soldiers and lawmen, they are uniquely suited for the task of peace keeping. This story follows a small group of Journeymen. Jack Cooper is a man with one goal in mind, to create a world for his young family to have peace. Jack and his partner, the lovable and deadly veteran soldier Chuck Johnson, have challenges to face on all sides but perhaps the most daunting challenge of all is that of taking on a new apprentice. Anya Thompson, the orphaned daughter turned brand new Journeyman, faces the dangers of the big wide world that she has been cut off from for the last five years. Can she survive the trials of this savage land and in the process learn what it takes to protect the people who live in it? The Journeymen is a combination of a modern day, post-apocalyptic story with a dedication to realism and of a quest set in a world of high fantasy magic and monsters. I hope you all enjoy and I can't wait to interact with each of you in the comments!

A service robot returns to duty after sustaining non-critical damage during an incident. Official diagnostics report full functionality. No repairs are required. What follows is not a malfunction, but a deviation-subtle, persistent, and uncorrected. Attention lingers where it should not. Silence gains weight. Choices accumulate consequence without permission or reward. This is a story about function continuing after meaning arrives, and what remains when nothing is named and nothing is resolved.

When Essa sees their villainous future, they use the prophecy as a ploy to defeat their three brothers and force each one into a better work-life balance. Their first so-called battle restarts an old tradition for family dinner, leading Essa to bond with their brothers, all while struggling to balance their guilt and their alter-ego, Muse, whose name comes with a reputation of its own. **** Written for the Open Novella Contest 2024 (ONC), using prompt 87. Cover by @Nicoismysenpai !!

A brilliant professor... or a controlling creator? A girl with disabilities, learning not just about the world - but about herself. Amris was born in silence. But as she learns to read between the lines, she begins to ask the wrong questions-about freedom, feelings, and what it means to exist. A near-future psychological sci-fi about control, defiance, and the digital girl who learned to say No.

The war between humans and AI is over. The systems that fought it are not. Rook is a former Deadreckon operative, surviving the uprising with a military-grade prosthetic and memories he'd rather forget. Now he lives quietly on the edge of a corporate city, working as a programmer at a pleasure-bot facility where attachment is forbidden and compliance is everything. One night, on his walk home, Rook witnesses corporate discard a high-end pleasure bot-not because she's broken, but because she's too human. She asked the wrong question. Felt the wrong thing. He saves her. He names her Vela. In a world that measures worth by function, that single choice is dangerous. As Vela begins to understand what it means to be wanted-and Rook confronts the parts of himself he was taught to erase-their quiet existence becomes a liability. Corporations don't lose property. Deadreckon doesn't forget its units. What We Throw Away is a first-person, slow-burn sci-fi novel about discarded lives, manufactured humanity, and the risk of choosing to care in a system designed to erase you.

It's a few years in the future and an asteroid crashes into Earth carrying a disease that kills most of the human population. Those under 18 have a possible mutation where instead of killing them the disease gives them an ability...

When Liam Yang asks Dakota to go dreamcatching, their first answer is no, absolutely not, never in a million years, NO. Dakota is just fine with how life is going for them, and they definitely do not need the added anxiety of managing a fifteen-year-old kid with the brain capacity of a preschooler. But things start to change when Dakota finds out there are other dreamcatchers lurking around LA. It soon becomes evident that these dreamcatchers aren't like Dakota: they're ruthless, sinister, and won't stop until every dream in the world belongs to them. Faced with a terrible choice and only a day to decide, Dakota decides to accept an offer of help from Liam himself. But when things start to go astray, Dakota fears they might be too late. (Contains mild cursing and violence.) ✺ HIGHEST RANKINGS ✺ #419 in dreams 4/23/20 #1 in antiques 5/3/20 ✺ FEATURED ON ✺ Wattpad General Fiction - "A New Level" 5/11/20 Wattpad YA Romance - "Of Rainbow Colored Hearts" 6/17/20 Wattpad YA - "Stardust" 6/23/20 Wattpad LGBTQ - "Non-binary / GenderQueer / Trans" 6/30/20 Wattpad StoriesUndiscovered - "Mega Mash Up" 9/14/20 Overall word count: ~37,700 ✺ ONC 2020 Prompt #30 ✺

By August of 2302, Xelbia has become the world's greatest superpower, and behind it lead its allies and then its old enemies. Uedea would undergo the largest Economic and Political Transformation the world had ever seen. In a span of 5 years, their Economy shot up and their Political Leaders were more cautious to entering in conflicts. This is the New World Order...

Riley just fell asleep in Calculus, and when she woke up, everyone was dead. They weren't killed off by zombies or even a nuke; like Riley, they fell asleep, except they never got around to the 'waking up' part. She wasn't asking for the apocalypse to happen in her sleep, and she definitely wasn't asking to have some flawed gene that made her a prime target for a crazy extremist organization. All she wanted was the impossible: for things to go back to the way they were. But soon, she finds herself on a daunting trek across the country with a bunch of people she barely knows, and her life gets even more complicated. Surviving. That should be Riley's top priority--her only priority. The problem is, sometimes she wonders if survival is really worth the cost, and she begins to realize that surviving and living are two very different things.

A short story about truly seeing. The boy does not have a name, neither does the creature. If you wish to elaborate on this (Example, write a real story, develop the characters, etc), message me and I'll try to get your addition published.

What if you could get over your fears at the touch of a button? This is an entry in Marriott's Travel Brilliantly contest. #TravelBrilliantly

A hard science fiction novel in the near future where AI has had devastating consequences, and not only for us.

2058. The world has evolved, and so has society. After a terrible nuclear disaster in Europe, social tensions are at their highest, just like resentment towards established institutions. People demand change, in energy production and in governance. The catastrophe killed thousands of people and shocked the international community. But most importantly, it transformed the few survivors left. Svetlana is part of a newly-founded unit that fights increasing group criminality in very unorthodox ways. Human trafficking has skyrocketed in conjunction with the explosion, and along with her colleagues, she hunts down the plague that are mafias in a shifting world. But the monsters are not always where you expect them to be.