Tractor Beam’s “Water Issue” is looking for speculative stories exploring humanity’s relationship with water, land, food systems, and survival. Editors want anti-apocalyptic fiction centered on irrigation, farming, migration, sea-soil technologies, environmental adaptation, and the social impact of water scarcity or abundance. The publication welcomes hopeful, inventive, and deeply human stories about ecosystems and interconnected communities rather than traditional collapse narratives.

Submission Guidelines Is water the original technology? Have a soil and sea story to share? Submit to our Fall issue. There’s a Mandinka proverb: rice fields that share borders share the same waters. Neighbors share more than fences; they share seasons, soil, and whatever tempestuous, whorling thing runs between them—animal, vegetable, or otherwise.

For the sixth issue of Tractor Beam, we’re looking for stories about the role of water in soil, growth, land, and ecosystems large and small. We are specifically seeking anti-apocalyptic visions that explore the future of water in farming and food production, island ecologies, hybrid sea-soil technologies, the people who move water and the people water moves. Stories about drought, diaspora, and what gets carried downstream.

There’s a reason hunger symbolizes longing and thirst symbolizes need. No matter how rich the soil, a seed needs the catalyst of water to grow. Water is the original technology.

We’ve been calling this the water issue, but it’s as much the fluidity issue, the migration issue, the can’t-contain-the-flood issue, the can’t-survive-without-it issue. There are no borders that can contain water, and no borders that will contain the fallout of not having enough.

As anyone who’s irrigated anything knows, water goes wherever it wants to go.

Tractor Beam pays $1,000.00 for all accepted submissions. Submissions will be considered for publication online on our website and Substack, and in some cases, for one-off printed editions.

We prefer stories under 6,000 words and comics 12-16 panels.

Stories may also be considered for the Protopian Prize with contributor consent.

Submissions close June 30th.