Road to Liberty Short Stories Book

In 2020, the Free Cities Foundation announced a short story writing competition, in which we asked writers to imagine what it would be like to live in a Free Private City. Over a hundred stories were submitted from all around the world, and the best are compiled in this book.

The result is a collection of more than twenty-five stories that carry one idea into fiction: a city run as a voluntary community, where residents contract for the services a government usually monopolises. The writers take that premise in very different directions, from noir and satire to hopeful, near-utopian visions, and set it everywhere from a fractured near-future Europe to a seastead and a station drifting between Earth and Mars.

A foreword by scholar Rahim Taghizadegan frames why Free Cities matter, and each story that follows tests the concept in its own way: the everyday life, the opportunities and the frictions of choosing where and how you want to live. Published in 2022, the anthology is meant less as an argument than as an invitation, a way to picture what living together could look like when it is built on consent.