Contest is now closed. Results will be announced in the middle of November at the blog.
Do you think Science provides a rich platform for speculative fiction?
Enter TheScian Science Fiction Short Story Contest 2008
First Rs.10,000/-
Second Rs.7500/-
Sponsored prize
Sunil promises to send Orson Scott Card's How to write science fiction to a story with the most creative scientific content (and does not break any laws of science).
Get published in TheScian Stories Book
Enter the contest and have your story included in the very first TheScian Stories - a collection of science fiction stories, to be published in 2009.
Contest Closing Date
30 September 2008
Introduction
It is impossible to define Science Fiction and we will not attempt it here. However, it is of utmost importance that we point out this: To write Science Fiction you must have, as Heinlein said, "a thorough understanding of the nature and significance of the scientific method". [A no-nonsense approach to discovering truth about anything of this world. It is broadly made of these steps: Observe a phenomenon (like, say, aurora borealis), come up with an hypothesis, use the hypothesis to make predictions, test the predictions for validity, repeat the above till there are no inconsistencies between predictions and observations. For more, see Wikipedia entry.] You may, for literary and dramatic reasons, bend or break the laws of nature in science fiction, but never do so unknowingly. Heed Heinlein's wise words.
Participation
Any Indian citizen living in India or abroad can participate in the contest. Science fiction does not restrict itself to geography and culture, but contests do for practical reasons. Other than this restriction there is none else. You can be of any color, any gender, any religion, any age, and you can have fingernails of any length. All you need is a good story to enter the contest. An author can submit only one story for the contest. Story must be your own.
Submission
Send your story that is no more than 6000 words to thescian.contests at googlemail.com with the subject line marked as "TheScian Science Fiction Short Story 2008 - Contest Entry". Attach your story as a plain text file (.txt file created in Notepad, for example). If you are using Microsoft Word to write the story please open the file in Notepad (or any good plain-text editor) and ensure it is readable before you send it. Stories sent in any other format will be ignored. TheScian.com recommends WriteRoom (for Mac) or Darkroom (for Windows) to budding writers. For the fundamentals of writing fiction, we recommend Alan Wall's Writing Fiction.
You must release the story to TheScian.com Contest under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Creative Commons License. All stories without a licensing note will be automatically entered as falling under the aforementioned license.
Dates
Last date for submission - September 30, 2008
Results announcement - November 15, 2008
Submission email should carry the below details.
Subject: TheScian Science Fiction Short Story 2008 - Contest entry
Story title:
Author's name/penname:
About the Author (not mandatory):
Author's note (not mandatory):
License Terms:
Mailing address in India (important, the prize money goes here):
Story Attachment: as .txt file (important, don't mess this up).
Story selection
Stories will be selected by Selva. His decisions are final.
Prizes
The first best story gets the author Rs. 10,000/-. The second best will fetch the author Rs. 7500/-. Prize money will be sent as a cheque to the postal address in India (and only in India) given in the submission email.
Questions
Email Selva [selvakumar at gmail.com].
After the contest
The competition entries will be hosted for public reading at TheScian.com. Promising stories will be considered for publication in the forthcoming TheScian Stories book to be published in 2009.
© TheScian.com. This document is released for public copying and distribution under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Creative Commons License. This notice must be preserved when copying and distributing.
