Old Worlds and New Visions: A Blend of History and Conjecture
These stories are not complete works but rather incomplete narrative fragments of short stories, moments captured mid-scene, or pages torn from a larger, unseen book. They offer glimpses into worlds just beginning to unfold or abruptly ending, inviting readers to imagine what came before and what happens next. This unique format encourages a participatory reading experience, where the absence of a definitive conclusion becomes an invitation for personal interpretation and creativity.
This collection is an experimental program at the intersection of human creativity, interdisciplinary arts and applied artificial intelligence research. It explores how digital tools can act as a partner in the writing process, shaping new forms of storytelling, scriptwriting and enhancing digital literacy skills and workflows. The project aims to understand the evolving relationship between human imagination and computational assistance in literary creation.
This post brings together a rich selection of Western, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Speculative Fiction. Authors Leaf Richards, Eva Suluk, Jamie F. Bell, and Tony Eetak contribute their unique perspectives to these tales, exploring the rugged landscapes of the past and the imaginative possibilities of the future. Each story offers a distinct voice and setting, demonstrating the breadth of their creative range.
We invite you to engage with these unfinished tales, not just as a reader absorbing words on a page, but as a co-creator. Allow your imagination to extend beyond the presented text, filling in the silences and envisioning the continuations that only you can write in your mind. Discover the narrative potential within these intriguing beginnings.
Today’s Unfinished Tales and Short Stories
The Whispering Gulch
Author: Leaf Richards | Category: Contemporary Fiction | Genre: Western
The air, thick and still, felt like a wool blanket thrown over the whole world. Redemption Gulch simmered under a sky the colour of bleached bone, the kind of summer afternoon where the heat itself seemed to press down on your lungs, making every breath a chore. Marie-Anne, her braids already escaping their ties and sticking to the back of her neck, squinted against the glare. The path leading out of town, a pale scar across the baked earth, wound its way towards the foothills, where the mountains, distant and purple, shimmered with heat. Today, though, their destination wasn’t the distant peaks but the closer, forgotten pockets of the gulch, where childhood dares and whispered legends often intersected.
The Unscripted Collapse
Author: Eva Suluk | Category: Stream of Consciousness | Genre: Literary Fiction
The community hall’s main room, usually reserved for bingo nights or children’s parties, felt different today. It hummed with a low, almost imperceptible thrum of nervous energy, a counterpoint to the relentless buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights. Outside, the last vestiges of a warm autumn wind rustled dry leaves across the cracked asphalt, but inside, the air was stagnant, heavy with the scent of stale coffee, old dust, and the faint, metallic tang that sometimes clung to forgotten public spaces. Ken, hunched on a folding chair, traced the scuff marks on his worn boots with a fingernail, trying to make himself small.
The Seaplane and the Sickbed
Author: Jamie F. Bell | Category: Historical Fiction | Genre: Historical Fiction
The air hung heavy and still, the kind of summer heat that made your clothes stick to your skin even before dawn. The East Main Post awoke with a familiar rumble, the ‘Fort Rock’ preparing for its journey. My boots crunched on the coarse gravel as I walked towards the jetty, the scent of damp earth and woodsmoke clinging to the morning air. Already, the bay water shimmered with a dull, coppery sheen under a sky promising another relentless day.
The Wet Hum
Author: Tony Eetak | Category: Gothic Horror | Genre: Speculative Fiction
A pervasive damp cold seeps through the urban landscape, where the river runs grey and unceasing. Corey, alone on a chipped concrete bench, observes his surroundings, a world muted by the season and an unspoken tension, before a familiar figure emerges from the gloom, bringing with her a strange atmospheric distortion.
Rust-Tinted Prairie’s Reach
Author: Tony Eetak | Category: Horror | Genre: Historical Fiction
The old Ford Pinto droned, a persistent, metallic hum that had become the rhythmic pulse of their escape. Outside, the vast flatness of Manitoba was slowly contorting, growing teeth of rock and forest as they pushed deeper into Ontario. Spring’s damp breath coated the windows, blurring the sparse, skeletal birches that flickered past like ghostly sentinels, and an insidious chill, not just from the weather, had begun to seep into the car’s threadbare upholstery.
Storytelling and the Arts, Skills Development and Digital Transformation
AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting: Within our arts and technology incubator, we are deeply engaged in exploring AI’s transformative role in creative development, as evidenced by our case studies in Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Western genres. Our research investigates how AI can address genre-specific nuances, such as crafting deeply thematic narratives in literary fiction, building imaginative worlds in speculative fiction, ensuring historical accuracy and period detail, and developing rugged, evocative settings for Westerns. This work demonstrates AI’s capacity to significantly aid storytelling and scriptwriting across these distinct and demanding literary forms.
Talent Development and Training: Our research concurrently focuses on the emergent skills essential for creative professionals navigating the digital age. The process of generating these diverse chapters in Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Historical Fiction, and Western genres highlights the crucial need for advanced digital literacy and expertise in managing AI tools effectively. This directly informs our understanding of future digital publishing and film production workflows, where professionals will be expected to leverage AI for everything from meticulous historical research to generating rich prose and complex character arcs, demanding a sophisticated blend of creative and technological acumen.
We’re excited to learn about these new technologies and how they can be applied to expand the boundaries of human storytelling. We encourage you to keep reading, keep imagining, and keep exploring the incredible potential that opens up when creativity meets technology.
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 interdisciplinary arts and narrative storytelling experiment. It is part of a creative arts and research program by The Arts Incubator Winnipeg and the Art Borups Corners collectives. This project focuses on two key areas: AI-Assisted Storytelling and Scriptwriting, exploring AI for generating ideas, plot structures, and alternative story arcs; and Talent Development and Training, studying the skills and training needs for creative professionals managing AI and immersive technologies to inform future training curricula. Funding and support were generously provided by the Ontario Arts Council Multi and Inter-Arts Projects program and the Government of Ontario. We thank them for supporting the arts, digital transformation, and applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) research for northern innovation in Ontario.
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