The Science Fiction & Fantasy FactoryMartin Grace Curates the Future Britains Speculative Fiction Anthology
Brits and Yanks speak the same language, yet their speculative fiction often dreads very different futures. Martin Grace, curator and contributor of Future Britains, joins Mookie on the Science Fiction & Fantasy Factory to dig into an anthology of 22 near-future stories by British writers, and what those stories reveal about a country wrestling with its own identity in 2026 and beyond.
Future Britains started as a contest between Martin and his father, fellow sci-fi writer Nick Grace: who could hit 3,000 words first? Martin won. His story, "Implanted," turns his hometown of Portsmouth into an island prison for dissidents in a Britain that bans human art and hands every song, painting, and book to state-controlled AI implants. On the train home from his day job as an AI specialist, he posted a note on Substack asking whether other British writers wanted to imagine the future of their own hometowns. Within 24 hours, two dozen said yes. Then came the panic: he knew nothing about publishing a book.
Nine months and significant hair loss later, the book launches October 23. Martin walks through how strangers became a collective: three-writer beta teams named after sci-fi greats, editor Evelyn volunteering to proofread and copyedit 80,000 words, and a firm rule that every story unfold this century, close enough that readers think, "That could happen to my kid." The stories sorted themselves into a concept-album arc of political unrest, human identity, machine life, civil war, and the end, closing on a vivid fable.
Then the conversation crosses the Atlantic. Mookie, the son of Hungarian emigres who grew up in a house that didn't speak English, reads Britain's fears against America's. Yanks dread plutocracy and runaway corporations. Brits aim their punk energy at politicians, the surveillance state, and AI as an instrument of government. Martin explains why Britain's closest answer to Elon Musk makes vacuum cleaners, and why his country still struggles to reckon with an empire whose slave-trade money built its stately homes and whose collapse sent his own family fleeing Uganda under Idi Amin.
Martin flips the question: what makes American sci-fi so American? Mookie's answer: spectacle. Dungeon Crawler Carl's gory intergalactic game show, Brandon Sanderson's $41 million Kickstarter, and SpaceX Starship launches that wreck their own launch pad. The two compare the Fresh Prince of Bel Air with Fawlty Towers and the two versions of The Office, and land on the core contrast: American fiction goes big and aspirational, British fiction goes small and intimate, down to a newspaper and a few extra rations at the local Tesco.
They close on ideas for a franchise already in motion, with Future Germania perhaps next and Canadian writers knocking. Plus Mookie's own work in progress: the sequel to Jonnie Fazoolie and the Transfinite Reality Engine and an interactive audiobook that casts the listener as the main character.
The Guest
Martin Grace is a speculative fiction author and musician whose stories are inspired by his interests in space exploration, technology, and our beautiful blue planet. Martin serialised his debut climate fiction novel, The Moon Talker, and its spin-off, Lunis-One, on Substack, and is the publisher and curator of the Future Britains anthology.
Pre-order Future Britains (paperback and ebook) on Amazon.
Special edition hardback with extra artwork: https://solstories.co.uk
Martin Grace on Substack: https://martingracewrites.substack.com
Sol Stories on Substack: https://solstories.substack.com
Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text!
Support the show
