Imagining Worlds Beyond the Page
This collection presents a series of unique, unfinished tales. Each piece offers a glimpse into a larger narrative, much like pages torn from an expansive book or moments captured mid-scene. Readers are invited to engage with these fragments, imagining the events that led up to them and speculating on what might follow.
This project represents an experiment in collaborative storytelling, exploring the intersection of human creativity and artificial intelligence. It examines how digital tools can function as a partner in the writing process, shaping new forms of storytelling and enhancing digital literacy.
Today’s selection spans genres from the expansive scope of Family Saga to the speculative realms of Dystopian Sci-Fi and the critical lens of Satire. These pieces come from the minds of Jamie F. Bell and Leaf Richards.
We encourage you to explore these stories not merely as an audience, but as a co-creator, completing the narrative arcs within your own imagination.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
Discover compelling short stories spanning Family Saga, Satire, Dystopian Sci-Fi, Dystopian, and Western Style BL, presented with Cinematic, Journalistic, Post-Apocalyptic Survival, and Historical Fiction flair. Our project champions digital literacy by exploring AI-assisted narrative and the evolving future of publishing through creative technology.
The Stasis of Iron and Ice
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Cinematic | Genre: Family Saga
The Winnipeg train station, usually a bustling artery connecting the vast expanse of the prairies, was a tableau of static humanity. Outside, a blizzard raged, plastering the grand windows with swirling white, reducing the world to a frantic, opaque blur. Inside, the air hung heavy with the cloying scent of stale coffee and desperation. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a pallid glow on the rows of hard, unforgiving plastic seats that had become temporary beds, offices, and battlegrounds for a small army of stranded travellers.
The Squirrel’s Ascent
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Journalistic | Genre: Satire
The oppressive summer heat hung heavy over Maple Creek, a shimmering haze distorting the edges of the main street. Sylvie’s battered old Civic coughed fumes into the still air, its air conditioning having given up the ghost somewhere around kilometer forty-five. Dust, fine as confectioner’s sugar, coated everything, clinging to the wilting petunias in front of the municipal building and settling like a second skin on the peeling paint of the storefronts. The town square, usually a sleepy patch of manicured grass, buzzed with a peculiar energy, a bizarre tableau forming under the relentless sun.
A Breath Held in a Rotting Season
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Post-Apocalyptic Survival | Genre: Dystopian Sci-Fi
The forest floor, a soft bed of sodden leaves and snapped twigs, offered little comfort. Each muffled step from Tom’s heavy boots seemed to pull him deeper into the muted greens and browns of a world still reeling. Above, skeletal birches, their papery bark peeling like ancient, sun-blasted bandages, clawed at a sky the colour of weak tea. The air, crisp with the sharp bite of early autumn, carried the faint, metallic tang that had become the scent of everything since the watershed began to hum.
A Bloom in Ash
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Journalistic | Genre: Dystopian
The prairie spring, usually a vibrant resurgence, felt like a dying gasp this year. Mud clung to everything, a thick, persistent ooze beneath boots. Above, the sky bled a bruised orange, not the gentle blush of a healthy evening, but a permanent, sickly hue that choked the light and painted the city in shades of perpetual twilight.
Silver-Frost Burden
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Historical Fiction | Genre: Western Style BL
The world was a study in whites and greys, a canvas of unbroken snow stretching into the blurred horizon of a Northwestern Ontario winter. The air, sharp and unyielding, promised no warmth, only the ceaseless, gnawing cold. Under a sky the colour of tarnished pewter, two figures moved with deliberate, heavy steps, small dark smudges against the overwhelming expanse of the frozen landscape, their breath pluming in frosty bursts that vanished almost instantly.
About the Project
By design, these stories have no beginning and no end. Many stories are fictional, but many others are not. They are snapshots from worlds that never fully exist, inviting you to imagine what comes before and what happens next. We had fun exploring this project, and hope you will too.
The Unfinished Tales and Short Stories collection is an experimental, creative research project by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners Storytelling clubs. Each chapter is a unique interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment, born from a collaboration between artists and applied AI researchers, designed to explore the boundaries of creative writing, automation, and storytelling. The project was made possible with funding and support from the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the Government of Ontario.
