--- title: "Future Tense" canonical: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/54/futures" publication: "The Docket" publisher: "The Docket" language: "en-US" guide: "https://anchor.is/docket/llms.txt" permalink: "https://anchor.is/docket/issue/54/futures" issue: 54 section: "futures" description: "Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today" authors: ["Wren Castellano","David Kern","Yuki Tanabe"] published: 2026-10-19 updated: 2026-10-16 articles: 14 --- # The Docket > The Docket is a weekly publication about the decisions climate change is already putting in front of Americans: whether to buy the generator, whether the flood insurance is enough, whether to stay in the city you love. It follows the people making those choices now. It treats climate anxiety as a reasonable response to real conditions. It won't tell you what to do, but it shows the tradeoffs clearly. [Read on the website]() ## Issue 54 — Future Tense Imagining plausible climate-changed futures to illuminate choices we face today ### The Underline - [The Canister]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter A bag of grain seeds arrives in Lapwai, Idaho, at eleven at night. It has traveled four hundred miles from a storage facility that's losing its cold, carried by a woman who wasn't sure whether to run the heater. The man receiving it has a dead walk-in cooler and the parts to fix it, but no way to know if the seeds are still alive until he sacrifices some of them to find out. Two people on opposite ends of an unauthorized trade wait for an answer that paper towels on a water heater may or may not provide. ### The HOA Minutes - [Minutes of the Saguaro Ranch Estates Homeowners Association Regular Monthly Meeting, October 13, 2035]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: The HOA Minutes It's 4:30 in the morning in a Phoenix suburb, October 2035, and the Saguaro Ranch Estates Homeowners Association has a quorum. The backup cooling unit is working. On the agenda: a tree that planted itself and now needs retroactive permission to exist, a noise complaint about a 3:45 a.m. cannonball contest, and shoes coming apart on the walkway. The contract secretary is writing all of it down. She has opinions about all of it. Only one version goes in the official record. ### The Kitchen - [The Second Floor]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-10-16 · Format: The Kitchen New Orleans, 2034. A grandmother's house was raised after flooding, so her kitchen is on the second floor now, eighteen steps up from the garden where she grows lemongrass and mint. Her granddaughter comes down for a long weekend to learn the family dishes: a spicy beef noodle soup, fried rolls, a dark caramel sauce for braised fish. The grandmother is exact about all of it. The broth has to stay clear. The wrappers can't split. Some of the ingredients have changed, though neither of them says so. ### The Well-Driller - [A Thousand Little Endings]() — Published 2026-10-16 *Future Tense is The Docket's speculative fiction section. Dar Koehn is a fictional character; the aquifer she drills is not.* ### The Recipe Card - [Mom's Sweet Potato Casserole]() — By [David Kern]() · Published 2026-10-16 *Sweet Potato Bake* ### Climate as Furniture - **Samantha Harvey's Orbital** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-16 Six astronauts orbit a scarred Earth for a day, absorbed in each other and the view. - **T.C. Boyle's Blue Skies** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-16 Siblings and parents clash over love and ambition while Florida sinks and California dries out around them. - **Claire Vaye Watkins's Gold Fame Citrus** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-16 Two squatters in drought-emptied California fall in love and take in a lost child. - **Beasts of the Southern Wild** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-16 A six-year-old in a sinking bayou tends to her dying father and imagines ancient beasts. - **Omar El Akkad's American War** — [Source]() — Published 2026-10-16 Climate change has already remade the map. A refugee girl grows up inside a second American civil war. ### Favorite Featured Stories - [The Nursery]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-10 · Format: Collective Story It's two in the morning outside Tucson, eighty-four degrees — a good night, the kind where you can work in long sleeves. Kira has just found that twenty percent of the amaranth crop crossed with the wrong pollen. The seed swap opens in four hours. A corporate licensing deal would cover their water-share payments for two years. And one of the five founders of their small seed collective has been carrying corn across the border to growers in Sonora for eight months without telling anyone. They have until dawn to figure out what they're bringing to the swap — which turns out to be the same question as what this place is. - [Inventory]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-10 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter The compressor died on a Tuesday in October, and Cass had two days before she started losing seed stock nobody in the basin could replace. The relay she needed was sitting in a dam 250 miles away, a dam her grandmother wanted dismantled and her grandmother's estranged step-brother wanted repaired. Cass didn't care about the argument. She cared about germination rates, and the cold room was gaining three degrees a day. In the fifth chapter of *The Underline*, the youngest voice in the ensemble inherits a forty-year political fight and reaches for her clipboard. - [Six Blocks]() — By [Yuki Tanabe]() · Published 2026-10-09 · Format: Phoenix Teen Story Phoenix, 2045. A sixteen-year-old named Luz wakes before six, checks her urine color, drinks her electrolytes, and walks to the library to volunteer before the heat closes the city down. All of it routine. What she's actually thinking about is a ceramic bowl in her backpack, hand-coiled for her former clay teacher, and whether she can walk six unshaded blocks past the library to deliver it before the morning window closes. Her parents would not approve. She has already packed the bowl. - [Both Clocks]() — By [Wren Castellano]() · Published 2026-10-02 · Format: The Underline Series — Weekly Chapter Tam has spent seven years measuring water temperature in creeks where salmon still hold in the cold patches. Then someone pushes his raw files through the network without his site notes, and inside three days both sides of a fight over the derelict Snake River dams send for him. Same curves, opposite conclusions, same Thursday. He can go west to the council or northeast to the dam. He can't do both. The second chapter of *The Underline Series*, set in the Pacific Northwest basin of 2071. ## Other sections in Issue 54 - [Human Stories]() - [Cascading Effects]() - [Emerging Science]() - [Climate Past]() - [The Lab]() ## More - [Publication guide]() - [Issue archive]()