Author Archives: Stephen Oram

About Stephen Oram

Stephen Oram writes near-future and speculative fiction. His work has been praised by publications as diverse as The Morning Star and The Financial Times.

Signposts to a post-pandemic future.

In an article just published in the British Science Fiction Association’s magazine Focus, I write about how near-future science fiction might help us see and take a different fork in the road to our future.

However, given that the trick with near-future fiction is to extrapolate from the present, the particular difficulty at the moment is knowing which elements of the changes we are undergoing will stick.

Here’s an excerpt that you may have views on: “… the world feels less sure, more transient to use a term from Future Shock, and it’s probable that there will be an increase in the number of people that will be able to accept science fiction as plausible. Unless they are more sceptical because they associate science fiction with dystopia and they feel they know what a true one of those looks and feels like.”

Do you feel more or less inclined to see near-future fiction as a way of thinking about the future?

Yours or Mine?

For those of you that enjoy flash fiction, why not take a look at Flash-Frontier. Not just because I have a story in the latest edition Doors, although I do, but because it’s online and jam packed with great flashes.

My piece is called Yours or Mine? and is only 250 words, which is less than a 2 minute read so as you can imagine, it gets straight to the point.


photo credit: irio.jyske “Doors and stairs” via photopin (license)

Of Human Bondage

I’m really pleased to have a short piece called Reclamation in the Winter 2020 edition of Sein Und Werden (Being & Becoming).

This is an online literary magazine of experimental prose, poetry and artwork that seeks to merge and modernise the ideas behind Expressionism, Surrealism and Existentialism.

They set out their manifesto as:

‘Sein und Werden’ is a quarterly online (and occasional print) journal of arts and letters. The title comes from the Expressionist concept of Sein und Werden – ‘being and becoming’, the notion that we are born as nothing and only through experience do we become who we are (an idea shared with Sartre in his work ‘Being and Nothingness’). Using certain techniques of cinematography to create lengthened shadows, twisted stairways and a distorted mise-en-scène, the Expressionists were able to depict a nightmare world that would later influence a number of other cinematic developments, such as film noir, as well as leading artistic movements. One such group who owed much of their technique to Expressionism were the Surrealists, who played with these concepts to create bizarre images of the subconscious, making use of dreams and automatic writing. The goal of ‘Sein und Werden’ is to present works that evoke the spirit of the Expressionist, Existentialist and Surrealist movements within a modern context, which I like to call ‘Werdenism’.

The theme of this edition is “Of Human Bondage” and there are forty pieces in all so plenty to keep you busy for a while – enjoy.