Engineering News-Record wants to explore the future of construction and work, through the lens of science fiction. We are asking our readers who invent the future of the industry every day to help us build a collection of new, previously unpublished, short science fiction—or even simply ideas for science fiction—to gaze into the crystal ball of construction's future.

Imagine, what H.G. Wells, Arthur C.Clark or Jules Verne woud be writing about now that could help us envision new solutions to challenges of today?

Submissions may be in the forms of plot outlines, summaries, poems, excerpts or complete stories—we're wide open—but they should not exceed 1,500 words

We will publish the best of those ideas and stories in an ENR anthology entitled Imagining Construction's Future: Science Fiction from the Readers of Engineering News-Record, in the fall of 2013. Click here for details.

We are looking for contributions to the collection that engage the reader, demonstrate insight into the world of construction and show how new, science-based ideas could change in the future of the industry. And while we expect to see some cautionary stories about futures we wish to avoid, hopefully, we also will see stories that envision how, through imagination, conditions that limit the industry today that most of us see as immutable constraints, could actually and plausibly be eliminated tomorrow through creativity and science.

Of such ideas, inventions are made.