A "Cade" is a self-contained super short fiction story that spans a maximum of 500 words. We embarked on this experiment due to two observations. Firstly, our current reading experience on smartphones is limited to transcribed literary formats, essentially reading printed books through reading apps. Secondly, our interactions with phones are predominantly brief, involving activities such as checking Instagram stories, reading news headlines, checking the weather, or engaging in quick chat messages. By combining these observations, we aimed to explore whether there was an opportunity to create a literary format specifically tailored to the way people interact with their phones, rather than the other way around.
From the perspective of the writer, this format presents a challenge: Can you tell a complete story within 500 words? A similar challenge was posed to the renowned science fiction writer Isaac Asimov back in 1957. During a panel, he was asked to spontaneously write a story, resulting in a mini-story called "Insert knob A, in hole B," which consisted of only 350 words. In this spirit, we are reprinting Asimovs story as our first Cade, showcasing the brevity and creativity that can be achieved within this format.