Science Fiction Short Stories – Free Competitions and Finding a Market

Here’s my 6-monthly list of free to enter competitions in alphabetical order – well I don’t want to be accused of favouritism, do I?

a) ARC – says on  their website they will be announcing a new competition shortly – so do keep your eyes open here. Word count over 5,000. More details here.

b) Baen’s Bar – still going as strong as ever – see here. The editor goes through the subs and if you’re lucky enough to catch his eye it will get published with fee being paid. Be warned, he has very few slots available. But you do get critiques of what you submit from fellow writers.

c) James Patrick Baen Memorial Writing Contest that looks for hard, near future, space-based science fiction – deadline normally 1st February each year. Word count limit is 8,000.  See here.

d) James White competition- this is an annual competition – it opened on 1st June this year and it’s closing date is 31st Jan 2014 – so you’ve got plenty of time. See here. Word count limit 6,000.

e) Writers of the Future contest – up to 17,000 words and many budding science fiction writers have worked their through their echelons Open for one story per quarter – unless of course you are successful! Their year ends 30^th September. Its forum can be found here.

f) Zharmae publishing press are about to start their next annual competition – 5^th of Feb (usually closes May 5^th – but best to check when the competion is open). Word count between 5,000 and 20,000. Check it out here. They have a very quick turnaround after the competiton closes on May 5^th… they announce winners on June 5^th!

Good luck to anyone entering any one of these.

As you know Duotrope has gone subscription only. For those of you not, for one reason or another, able to pay their fees, there is a new site that is very similar to Duotrope. It is free and ask only for donations It’s here. Please note it is still at beta version i.e. at a late stage in the development of the app.

And of course there’s the long standing Ralan – which is here.

Science Fiction bits and bobs

English: Westminster Cathedral in London. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yesterday was the BSF/SFF mini-convention and the AGMs of the respective organisations in London in Westminster – no we were not affected by the protests because the organisers thoughtfully gave us a heads up on what was going on… bonus points to them!

I met a friend there and was absolutely delighted to be told that they had just signed a contract to get one of their novels published in both print and e-book formats. That novel deserves to be in print. It has a very simple premise and we are taken through the common sense / logical consequences of how things pan out from there. It was a good read when I beta-read it, and I know it’s been edited and improved since. So it really is good ‘un. I will announce details when it comes out.

The only down side is that it’s going to be published in USA. Just like my C.A.T. e-books! So I have to ask why isn’t the British publishing industry picking things like this up?

The James White Award for science fiction short stories up to 6,000 words has opened. Their deadline is 31st January 2014 – well Easter is late next year! So get your pens writing, your computer word-processing and enter! Now the winner for this will be published in Britain!

 

Another SF Prediction Coming True

Looks like I’ve be at it again… you know that business of predicting the future through my science fiction writing. Well this time’s it rather more detailed and serious than just a throw away sentence hidden away in the prose. For those of you who’ve read Agents of Repair in Jupiter’s Issue 29, Thyone see here.

Now to the really worrying part of this post. This was the story that led me to C.A.T., a sort of stepping stone both story-wise and technology-wise. Now can you imagine a Solar System populated with arrogant, blundering, clever C.A.T.s?

So let’s add some more worrying aspects about the future. I’ve done a tech diagram of other aspects of what C.A.T. needs. Some are easier to develop that others, but over time I would expect all of them to come about. Whether they are bunched together in a C.A.T.-like configuration is another issue entirely, but the possibility exists. So if you want nightmares to dream about an exciting future examine the diagram carefully.

 

Harper Voyager Open Call – Consequences

Harper Voyager have during last week put up another post, saying they have completed the first round sift on their open call as of last October. That means they have evaluated 4,543 submissions, rejected 3595 as being not right for them and kept 948 for further consideration. That’s about 1 in 5 submissions!

Those are the facts, now for the observations and comments.

Their call was for the full range of speculative fiction that included horror and fantasy. From the graph below, which is the number of new printed  books published by genre, you could say the ratios are science fiction 1, horror 1, fantasy 3, paranormal romance 2. Of course this ratio may not extend to what Harper Voyager intend, but if they did and if those ratios were reflected in what they’ve kept back for further consideration, then we are talking about talking about only 1 in 7 being science fiction, or only 136 books.

 

But let’s look at this the other way around. There are 136 science fiction books of good enough quality for one of the big 5 publishing houses to seriously consider taking them on, and all of them are UNAGENTED!

The implications of this are, in a business sense, staggering. There has to be at least a serious fault somewhere in the publishing process if the agents cannot match what the publishers are looking for. Where that fault lies and exactly what it is, I don’t know.

[Yes, I know there will always be some unagented authors because new authors continually come along, but they are a small percentage of this.]

I have long since said there was a mismatch between what the science fiction readership wanted to see and what was being published… and I say good on Harper Voyager for trying to do something about it.

They got a lot more submissions than they expected. They initially said they would get in contact with those authors they wanted to take further by 15th January, but it took another four months to finish the first reads. One consequence I anticipate from all this is that they will NOT be holding an open door later on this year as they initially anticipated, because they are still dealing with last October’s. Another consequence is that they are likely to take two year’s worth of novels up for publication to backfill the year they are missing out on.

But there have been immediate consequences. For instance, Tor UK has opened its doors to unagented submissions, though if I remember correctly, they said they were swamped at one time.

So, with more opportunities for the unagented authors to put their work before the publishing houses, where does this leave the industry as a whole? Obviously there will be less reliance on agents putting forward sifted good books by the publishing houses, even if it means more work for them. As to what else will change, well that is dependent on which unagented books the publishers decide to put out for the general public to read and what takes the public’s fancy. But whatever happens, the what I now call traditional science fiction themes will be joined by new ones. After all, why else would Harper Voyager have had an open call?

Ripple Effect – the Official Response

I wrote to my MP about the concerns my science fiction short story ‘Ripple Effect’ published in Jupiter 38 threw up. He was kind enough to ask the Secretary of State, the Right Honourable Edward Davey MP for a response. This is what the Secretary of State had to say:

“Small-scale local weather effects tend to dissipate quickly within the genral turbulence of the atmosphere. In theory a small-scale effect could result in consequences at much larger scales but this is generally only seen in grossly simplified chaos models. Complex models used by meteorologists confirm that much larger changes than those at the smallest scales are needed to make a real difference to the weather.

“The main reason why meteorologists are currently unable to forecast the weather accurately more than a few days in advance relates to the need to represent (or ‘parameterise’) some of the crucial physical processes governing the weather but which operate on small space scales (such as cloud formation). Parameterisation is needed because of limited available computing power. Also, model sensitivity to initial conditions is characteristic of highly non-linear systems, including the weather. Observations are necessarily limited, resulting in imperfect initial conditions for model runs. Such inaccuracies can grow over a few days to a week and reduce the skill in forecasting the weather than far ahead.

“Nonetheless, it remains essential that we take urgent action to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases, as certain weather events are projected to increase in frequency and/or intensity as a result of climate change.”

My thanks to both my MP and the Right Honourable Secretary of State for the time and trouble they took to reply to me.

… um… why do I think there will be further chronicles from Hermione? Or put it another way, one of friends who read my short story before it was published suggested I expand it into a novel entitled, “Climate Wars”. I’m now thinking he was right…

Happy 40th Jupiter

That small science fiction magazine has reached its 40th issue. It has now kept to its 3-monthly schedule without fail for ten, yes TEN years! CONGRATULATIONS, Ian Redman… a job well done!

I’m even more pleased to see one of my fellow authors, Dean Giles, with TWBPress has had a short story published in it.

It has of course had numerous good reviews. So those of you who haven’t yet cottoned onto this wonderful publication, see here!

May the Fourth be with You!

Sorry, the resistance force in me weak is!

I’ve taken a look at the Amazon websites (plural means both the UK and US ones) and found new reviews for C.A.T. – thank you. They are by people I don’t know who have bought the e-book. Which means the word about how good the story is is spreading. In a way it’s a kind of milestone to actually know that complete strangers have taken enough of an interest in C.A.T. to buy it.

Needless to say C.A.T. is having a serious session of self-satisifeid smugness at the moment!

The other day I dug out a small piece of work that I did many years ago. I cringed at the style and wording, but still liked the ideas (yes plural again) behind it. So I rewrote it in a couple of evenings. Then it dawned on me… the science has since discovered things that make my scenario all the more probable. Again! I get the distinct feeling that there is something in the understanding of science and how it progresses that allows some people to accurately work out or have an intuition about how it will develop in the future. It’s  as if the force had been with me when I originally wrote that piece.

And yet as I look around at some of the hard science fiction that is being written today, this element of predictive science just seems to be missing. It’s as if the authors are rehashing, or is it rehearsing, old ideas. Where is the new science in science fiction?

So yes, I’m working on something new – a real combo of science to make life a little more bizarre. But in looking forward in science fiction, I’ve also looked back! I’ve realised that if I put my invention (for want of a better description) in a certain setting I could use a classic story line that Jules Verne wrote. Well that’s how it started out… dag nab it… the thing’s taken on a life of it’s own. All I can say is the force is with it!

Women in Science Fiction

The controversy about the lack of female science fiction writers and protagonists is likely to come to the fore again with Radio 4′s Women’s Hour on Friday talking about ‘what happened to tough women in science fiction‘.

This debate will not go away until either a reasonable explanation for the lack of women in science fiction is given or there are more women writing and portrayed in the genre. The fact that even after all this time no explanation has been readily forthcoming speaks for itself.

Yes, there have been initiatives to encourage and report more women in science fiction, and whilst they have made a few inroads, they have not solved the issue.

My take on it?

The stats speak for themselves to say the bias against women has and continues to exist (see e.g. wiki on Women in science fiction). I haven’t got to the bottom of the reason behind this, but I do know of quite a few new lady science fiction writers who are finding it very difficult to get a foothold in science fiction. And yes, their writing is of the quality I would like to see in the bookshops, so we are not talking about sub-standard work here.

But the one thing I can be sure about is that in due course the historians will ask the self-same questions and will eventually work out where the fault lies… if there have been any untoward biases, the guilty will pilloried.

 

Flight of Fancy?

Faster than light? (Photo credit: AZso)

There was I at lunchtime, enjoying a peaceful cup of coffee thinking about what I could do with my newly designed spaceship – story-wise that is – when a thought struck me, “What if I did that?”

Nah – it won’t work, definitely not. What I need is that. Well yeah, that’s fine, but it’s still impossible. It has to be impossible. It just can’t be done.

Hold on a mo… there’s nothing wrong with the principles in the design, is there? No. It should work then, shouldn’t it?

Nah, it’s out of the question, absolutely and totally. Everybody says it is… well as good as…

But the tendril of thought keeps sneaking back… it’s a goer, a real super-duper goer.

Something has to be wrong… but what? It’s time to get out the textbooks again to find out where I went wrong. Otherwise we’ll have a way of travelling faster than light.

And it’s an interesting design for a spaceship… a design that may explain why we haven’t seen spacefaring aliens in our neighbourhood. Um… I’m getting that strange feeling that things are starting to fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle to explain lots of questions about existence and the universe.. And when you or I get that feeling, we both know we’re onto something… even if it’s only a cohesive background for a science fiction story…

But that tendril of thought keeps creeping back… it could just work…

Place, the Protagonist in Science Fiction

Sketch of Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It may be just my biased, warped outlook on science fiction, but it suddenly dawned on me that there really hasn’t been any new places in science fiction for quite a while. Now by new I don’t mean variations on a theme, but somewhere so unusual that it surprises the reader.

The last place WOW that anyone got from me was when Geoff Landis proposed the colonisation of Venus using aerostats, followed by floating cities, because at c. 50km altitude its atmosphere is very much like Earth’s at sea level. That proposal is now ten years old.

Before that it was Alastair Reynold’s massive light huggers, a very logical hard science fiction approach to travelling to the stars. Revelation Space of course was published in 2000. And before this? We’re into the ’80s with Niven’s Ringworld and Integral Trees, inside the computer courtesy of Tron and cyberpunk.And before that… well there were lots. So why aren’t we seeing more new places now?

One answer may be because we have explored a lot of places during the middle of the last century and there are very few to find that aren’t a result of a variation of a theme.

But it’s not the answer I would go for. There seems to be a distinct lack of imagination about place in the genre today. I can think of several places I’ve tried to write about that are new… yes really new. But with the trying also comes the explanation and that slows the story down somewhat. So these new places with their sense of wonder are not taken up by the publishers. But I’m sure better writers than me would succeed in smoothing in the explanation much better.

Place should be considered as a protagonist in any story. Mostly it is a passive onlooker to what is going on, but in every story it does one way or another interact with the main protagonists of that story. Take for example the harsh environments of the desert, the Arctic and space and think about each of them in turn. You react differently to each, don’t you? So much so, that it brings out the point that every place engenders a different reaction and there ought to be oodles and oodles of new places in science fiction.

But I come back to the point that there isn’t and to the question of why?

Is it because writers (the professionals that is) have to push story upon story at such a fast pace that they can’t give themselves time to think up new places? Yes, it takes time to develop them, answering the why and what if questions about ‘the world’ you are developing. Could this be the real reason?