About

The magazine of Protocol Fiction

Monstrous Times is the magazine of Protocol Fiction. We publish fiction about agents — humanoid and otherwise — living in strange rules environments. We are particularly interested in settings where older systems are breaking down and new ones are still taking shape. What kinds of people do new systems produce? What happens to people shaped by the old ones? And what kinds of monsters thrive in the gap between the two?

If you’re looking for a place to start, I’d highly recommend the recently concluded anthologies Zoothesia by Spencer Nitkey and Legends & Ledgers by Thing Party.

Now the origin story flashback. We first came across the idea of Protocol Fiction in Matt Webb's writing a few years ago and thought: we are the right people to write Protocol Fiction. We published several of our first stories in Protocolized, run by the Protocol Institute, where we helped develop the genre.

One of our early anthologies was The Librarians, a collection of stories about the future of archives developed from a workshop run by Long Now Labs and the Protocol Institute.

In the last year, we have run several Protocol Fiction contests, producing three anthologies: Ghosts in the Machine, Terminological Twists, and Building and Burning Bridges.

We are the only fiction magazine that publishes entirely human-written stories alongside stories crafted using AI. We strongly believe that entertaining stories can be made with AI, because we have done it in anthologies such as Trainverse and Legends & Ledgers.

You might have noticed that we publish a lot of anthologies. Although we encourage single-story submissions, we are especially interested in writers who want to develop a series of stories set in the same fictional universe.

Join us. Read the stories, and write one for our Interregnum Story Contest.