January Theme Prompt: Auld Acquaintance
- Jim Dutton
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Write a retro-futuristic sci-fi story.
Retro-futuristic science fiction looks backward to imagine tomorrow. Its charm lies in the tension between optimism and anxiety: visions of the future filtered through the design languages, social hopes, and technological limits of their own eras. These stories are not forecasts so much as cultural time capsules, preserving what a generation wanted the future to be, or feared it might become.
Early retro-futurism often radiated faith in progress. In Metropolis, sleek towers and mechanized labor promised efficiency while warning of dehumanization. The aesthetic — Art Deco lines, monumental scale — suggested that order and beauty could be engineered. Many stories from this era incorporated what would later be called Steampunk elements.
Mid-century works pushed the optimism further. The postwar boom birthed a chrome-plated tomorrow of flying cars, robot helpers, and domestic ease, cheerfully satirized by The Jetsons. Technology there smoothed away drudgery; the future was suburban, clean, and fun.
By the late twentieth century, the tone darkened. Corporate power, environmental decay, and information overload reshaped the look and feel of imagined tomorrows. Blade Runner fused neon noir with rain-soaked streets, replacing rocket-age optimism with cyberpunk melancholy. Its future felt crowded and exhausted, yet mesmerizing — proof that retro-futurism could critique the present as sharply as it celebrated possibility.
What unites these works is not accuracy but style as argument. Ray guns and rivets, vacuum tubes and holograms — each era’s props signal beliefs about control, speed, and human agency. When modern creators revisit retro-futurism, they often do so knowingly, layering nostalgia with irony. The Fallout series, for instance, freezes 1950s atomic optimism at the moment of catastrophe, turning cheery propaganda into a haunting reminder of promises gone awry.
In retrospect, retro-futuristic science fiction endures because it lets us converse with our past selves. These stories explore how hope evolves, how fear transforms, and why certain dreams persist in new forms. The future they show us may never arrive.
But the questions they pose remain stubbornly current.
About this prompt
For this theme prompt, we ask you to write an imaginative and evocative flash sci-fi story using any topic and sub-genre you choose. Your story must be set in some past era and include futuristic elements and devices that incorporate technology of the past.
Remember that we expect a science fiction story, and not every steampunk story is sci-fi.
Rules
The rules for the theme prompt are as follows:
Entries should be submitted in the usual way using the Write for Us submissions link.
Mention the title of the prompt (Auld Acquaintance) in the Notes field of the submissions form.
Submissions must be received by February 15, 2026, to qualify.
Entries must comply with all the usual SFS Guidelines.
Your work can be horror, romance, dystopian, alien, or whatever, as long as it’s Sci-Fi and addresses the prompt's theme.
Submit only one story for this prompt.
You may continue to submit stories to SFS that are outside the contest, and we encourage you to do so.
If you have more than one story that fits the theme, please submit your best one for the prompt and send us the others as non-theme entries. Also, if the editors feel your theme entry is good enough to publish but does not satisfy the theme requirements, we reserve the right to accept it as a non-theme submission.
After the prompt has ended and all the entries have been processed, we will list and link to the participating stories in a blog post. The editorial staff will choose one story for special mention as the Editors' Choice.
Exemplars
Although the stories of early authors like H. G. Wells (The Time Machine) and Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) are often referred to as "proto-steampunk" stories, they don't really qualify as such. First of all, the neologism "steampunk" wasn't coined until 1987 as a tongue-in-cheek variant of "cyberpunk." More to the point, those stories are not really retro-futuristic, since they were actually published during the same Victorian era in which they are set.
Since then, the steampunk genre has been popular in a variety of works in many different formats, including manga/anime (Metropolis 1949), video games (FInal Fantasy 1987, Fallout 1997), television (The Wild, Wild West 1965), mainstream cinema (Time After Time 1979) and popular music (Honeybee by Steam Powered Giraffe, 2012).
Here are some vintage retro-futuristic and steampunk sci-fi stories you might not have read yet:
Behold the Man — Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, September 1966.
In this imaginative and risky novella, British sci-fi author Moorcock relates an alternative history of Jesus Christ's birth and life from the perspective of a modern-day (mid-sixties) time traveler, Karl Glogauer. Things do not go as expected.
There Will Come Soft Rains — Ray Bradbury, Collier's Weekly, May 6, 1950.
I've linked to this one before for an earlier theme prompt. It's such a sad, gentle, great story that I'm always happy to get a chance to read it again. You should too!
Seventy-Two Letters — Ted Chiang, Vanishing Acts, June 2000.
A lot of strange ideas about religion, alphabets, sexuality, and automation in this one. There's even some commentary that could be relevant to our current debates and consternation about AI in creative roles.
"What kind of sculptors would we produce if they spend their apprenticeship watching automata do their jobs for them? I will not have a venerable profession reduced to a performance by marionettes."
"That is not what would happen," said Stratton, becoming exasperated himself now. "But examine what you yourself are saying: the status that you wish your profession to retain is precisely that which weavers have been made to forfeit. I believe these automata can help restore dignity to other professions, and without great cost to yours."
This month, ask yourself the perennial New Year's question posed by Robert Burns: Should auld acquaintance be forgot? If your answer is no, then go back in time and let that auld acquaintance tell us what they imagine their future might look like.