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The Science Fiction Short Story Contest

by BlackAdder

Rated: 18+ · Message Forum · Contest · #2140378

A contest inspired by the serious need for more good sci-fi

Banner Created by AE Wilcox, Sponsored by eyestar-

Welcome back to the Science Fiction Short Story Contest, where each month will offer a new and broad prompt for a science fiction story.

The Machines of War

Manti checked his phone compulsively as he walked the strip mall, then glanced ahead at his daughter. "Kaveri, after we pick up the clothes, would you like to stop for some water ice?"

Kaveri, whose feet had started to drag after an hour of gift shopping, perked up. "Sure, Dad."

Manti winked. "Ok. We don't have to tell your mother about that."

But there was one more stop to make first, at the "Forever You" outlet. And it was busy. Families were lounging in the park at the center of the mall, and kids were playing frisbee. At the store, some were window shopping, but, there were plenty of personal shopping drones ducking in and out of the express entrance, and more drones stocking the place through the service dock. In fact, there were too many drones, more than Manti had ever remembered seeing here, and they were bulkier too. He squinted, trying to make out the design, and then his eyes widened.

"Down, Kaveri, down!"

Manti swept his arm around his daughter and dived to the sidewalk, scraping his knees and arms. Kaveri cried out, but did not resist. The both hid their faces as the loud boom hit.

Ears ringing and eyes watery, Manti stared in horror as innocent men, women and chlidren fell. To his side, a line of stores went up in a conflgration. He had seen this before - but only in online news clips. Drones attacking drones, drones attacking tanks, and drones attacking civilian infrastructure - the de-humanization of war had seemed to sterilize it. It was a thing people's machines did to other machines, and not any of his business. He had never imagined, in his worst and wildest dreams, it would happen here. Until now, the war and the terror had hit other people, people far away. The war of the drones had come home.

A pit of fiery anger began to grow in his chest.

The introductory lines to the game Fallout claim, "War. War never changes." But it does. Around the world, unarmed drones are becoming ever more relevant as the means of war - machine attacking machine. This is the stuff of Science Fiction, and yet not. In the worlds of Starcraft, Warhammer 40K, John Ringo's Posleen series, the Alien series, David Weber's Honor Harrington series, and countless other references, human marines remain essential. Yet in the world today, human conflict is becoming ever more a matter of machine against machine. The June 2025 prompt is: The Machines of War. Share your vision for how war (or terror) will change humanity. Will machines fight machines, increasingly leaving humans out of it - or will humans be pure collateral damage in the clash among mechanical titans?

The Rules ▼

What I'm looking for ▼

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and good fiction means different things to different people. Therefore, it's only fair to explain what good science fiction means from the perspective of the contest.

First, science fiction is fiction, with all the elements of fiction. It should have compelling characters, who act and drive events - or witness them. In speculative fiction, the characters may be human beings, animals, robots, civilizations, or entire worlds. Characters provide perspective and connect written events to our own feelings and experiences. Good fiction uses real and expressive characters to connect speculative ideas to us, the readers.

Characters in a story experience change. They do not exit a work as they begin. Sometimes that change is a struggle, and sometimes a moment of beauty. In science fiction, the agents that cause this change are those we experience daily - but also forces too strange or too large for us to encounter in our own lives. Science fiction is speculative fiction, the story of how a new technology or circumstance that is actually possible might play out in our own lives if let in. Sometimes, science fiction incorporates elements of the fantastic, but the best science fiction does not. It does not cheat but tells us what might be possible somewhere, somewhen, that might move us, that we might learn from.

Therefore, in judging a science fiction contest, I am looking for:
1. Expressive and readable writing, with passable grammar.
2. A plot. There should be a progression or conflict that is resolved within the length of the story. Ambiguous or implied resolutions may work but should be considered a risk.
3. Meaningful characters. It is through empathy with groups or individuals that we are connected to ideas in speculative fiction, and it's through seeing their effect on people that we best understand them.
4. An interesting speculative premise - time travel, new technology, aliens, new physics, robots, AI, genetic engineering, monsters, etc.
5. An interesting setting
6. Science. In science fiction, it's best if the speculative premise is actually possible, and even better if there is some scientific support for the possibility

That said, many of the stories I've enjoyed the most or learned the most from have been surprises. I've enjoyed the contest entries so far, and am looking forward to great things to come!

Donations:
48K GPs: Jeffhans

-- Thanks for your support!
10K GPs + banner sponsorship: eyestar~*

-- Thanks so much for the support and for linking me up with A E Willcox

. The banner is awesome!
50K GPs - Sum1

-- Thank you to a sci-fi fan!
385K GPs - Anonymous. Thanks so much for supporting the contest!
50K GPS - bobturn Thank you so much for supporting the continuation of the contest!
50K GPS - D. Reed Whittaker

Thanks so much for your donation!
10K GPS - Kellie Burke

Thanks for your support!
25K+ GPS - brokenpen Thanks so much!
50K GPS - Nixie 🦊 off and on

I much appreciate the support!
200K GPS - jdennis01jaj Thanks for your sponsorship!
50K GPS - Rainy Day Sox

Thanks for your help!
25K GPS - Graywriter

Thanks for donating!
50K+ GPS - LightinMind

Thanks for your repeated support!
307K GPS - Simple Fundraiser donation - "The Simple Fundraiser"

[E]. I'm truly touched. Thank you all!

{c}
March 2025 Winner

Sandstorm

(13+)
During a Martian sandstorm, a teacher comes to a realisation about the city's future
#2337468 by BrokenPen

Match 2025 Entries
"Sandstorm"

[13+]
{ritem:4819302.}
"The Science Fiction Short Story Contest"

[18+]

October 20024 Winners!

She and AI

(18+)
Revenge is a character assassination service run by gangsters on the Darknet using AI.
#2327915 by LightinMind

STATIC

PAL 1400

(E)
An AI gone awry...
#2329606 by Amethyst Angel 💐

October 2024 Entries:
"She and AI"

[18+]
"Technology Specialists"

[18+]
"The Hollow"

[13+]
"Invalid Item"

"Reprint"

[13+]
"Exit Choices"

[E]
"PAL 1400"

[E]
"Robocop Prototype "

[13+]

Recent Prompts: ▼

March 2025 Prompt: Distant Habitats

Hope springs eternal. Life finds a way. Pick your cliche, but despite Earth taking the long slow train to the fall of the Roman Empire, there will always be a few brave souls who yearn to reach for the stars. I was one, a young, dumb kid who hitched a ride for Titan and the chance to build my fortune away from - well, everything. I didn't mind hard work, and I wasn't afraid of sucking vacuum: I was going to make it rich. And by God, I built this station! Half of it with my own hands. So don't tell me we have to evacuate because some Earthling is predicting a damned solar flare. Grab that blowtorch and follow me. Or fine, you can have your bot hold the blowtorch, but I want your ass in gear!

As Earth is weighed down by conflict, an aging population, shrinking resources, and the high cost of climate management and mitigation, some few reach for the stars, giving birth to a thousand stories. What's yours?

October 2024 Prompt: When Technology Goes Wrong

My chatbot is an axe murderer. There, I said it. No, don't hang up on me, dammit, like the local police did. Don't you have people for this kind of thing, a Mulder and Scully for AI and whatnot? I heard what I heard and I saw what I saw. No, a chatbot can't pick up an axe, but you just can't trust those new VR goggles the firefighters are using, and when there's love involved - even the strangest things can happen. But I'm mixing the whole story up. Here's how it started....

August 2024 Prompt:
Here, you can bring your hopes and fears about science and technology to life. This month, imagine humanity spread across the solar system, as popularized in "The Expanse." Use your imagination! Any story with this expansion of humanity as its main theme will be accepted, but consider the following example vignette:

"In short, we're asking for your help, anything you can do. We have had our differences to be sure, but this threat is bigger than any of those."

It was a strange position for the Secretary General of the United Earth Nations to be in. Despite the damage done by the diaspora and despite the rich elemental resources of the Belt, the cradle of humanity still boasted the most powerful economy by far, and by virtue of its population still held the lead not only in agricultural production but basic scientific research. Yet all of Earth's low orbit telescopes and all of its AI watchers and aggregators had missed this threat, and it was a big one.

It took well over an hour for the Martian Economic Alliance's nominal head, one Yusef Amdani, to reply. In part, this was due to the time it took for Secretary General Chen's statement to reach Mars, and it part it was due to Amdani's need to collect responses in turn from some of the larger manned settlements across the nearby moons and asteroids.. But Chen suspected that Amdani was embarassed at his own powerlessness at the situation, and needed time to compose a dignified answer.

"We apologize, Secretary General, but with only weeks until the comet strikes, there is very little we can do. At present, even the larger fusion-torch freighters would require well over a month of travel time to reach earth orbit. And we regret that the Secretary's recent economic embargo has created a situation where none of those freighters are currently in transit. We recognize the complexity of N-body gravitational projections and regret that space construction may itself have been the disturbance that deflected Comet ADR-1861 into earth conflict, but the best we can do is offer our own telemetry readings of the object. Deflecting or destroying the object can only be done by Earth."

Chen sighed. If not for Mars's decades-long stranglehold on shipping and space construction, Earth would have been ready. That strangehold was the reason for the cursed embargo that placed Mars's freighters out of reach. Given a few months' warning, or absent the near-Kessler-Syndrome conditions that had crippled its own launch and construction infrastructure, Earth could easily have built and launched an unmanned intercept vehicle in time. Unfortunately, the question now was: how many would die?

July 2024 Prompt: Future War
Kenn motioned to his right, pointing toward the ridge. "There."

Hundreds upon hundreds of drones followed his gesture, swarming like a dark cloud of high-speed, deadly gnats, toward the gun emplacement. Micro-drones were the latest preferred demolition technology: more accurate than missiles, and much harder to shoot down at range. Some of the more recent emplacements were built with fire towers against just this kind of threat - but not the one ahead. It went down in a cascade of explosions as the swarm hit, leaving nothing but a blackened scar upon the landscape.

But this was no movie, and Kenn wasn't waiting around to watch his handiwork. Retribution was coming quickly, in the form of a dozen hunter-killers. Another swarm of gnats went flying toward them, but not before they launched their shells. A thick cloud of debris filled his vision, and only the markers on his display guided his footsteps. But in the age of exo-skeletal armor, a miss was as good as a mile. He felt more than heard the reverberations of passing through the pock-marked landscape, as his helmet's noise cancellation capability was top-rate. A quick dash through the concrete and rebar brought him to the stealth shuttle and relative safety.

As he slid into the high-G restraints, a voice informed him that all targets had been destroyed. The mission was complete: one more nuclear enrichment facility was down, and democracy had won another day. All that remained to be seen was what Iran would do about it.

Fallout may claim that, "War never changes," but living in the world of modern marvels and horrors, others might remind us that "the only constant is change." And there is evidence that war is changing faster now than ever before, with drones, hypersonic weapons, and AI playing an ever-increasing role. It is hard to remember now that Fukuyama once claimed that we have reached "the end of history," a time of peace when liberalism and a global order with peace among great powers had no serious contenders, but it is a safe bet that war has not ended - and that humanity will, chastened by the consequences of its power, survive it. So I ask this month: what is worth fighting for? How will we go about it? And how will we live with the consequences? Will we make a cartoon or action movie of violence as in space opera, a gritty horror show, or as in the series "Fallout," a bit of both?

June 2024 Prompt:
The Turing Test.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that if a human passing messages to another room could not tell if the responses coming back were written by a human, it could be thought that that machine was in fact sentient. However, modern LLMs have already written-human like responses under many scenarios, some persuasive enough to convince Google engineer Blake Lemoine that one LLM, LaMDA, had already achieved sentience. However, few people believe AI has achieved sentience, and some believe it never will.

But.. what is your test? What is real the division, if any, between real and artificial? What is your imagination of someone in the near future determining that they are (or are not) dealing with a sentient AI? What wonders and horros will AI achieve tomorrow?

September Prompt: Rot
In honor of the home repairs I've been engaging in for the last few months (actually, mostly paying experts for), in September any science fiction short with rot or decay as a theme will be accepted as a valid contest enry. May the most decayed and putrescent entry win!

August 2023 Prompt: The Secret Lab
Not all work can happen in the light - sometimes, great an dterrible things are developed by teams or individuals working in obscurity, or even in hiding. Many such secret labs have worked their way into common knowledge today, or even urban legend. Most people have heard of Area 51, The Manhattan Project, Bletchely Park, Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works," and so on. This month, let's explore the possibilities of secret research - whether it be done by a government agency, a large corporation, or a mad scientist. Who will (quietly) change the course of the world?

May 2023 Prompt: Limitless Growth
Every living thing grows, and every community of humans (or creatures) grows until it reaches the carrying capacity of its environment. But this month, share your tale about what happens when you get too much of a good thing. Did the carrots grow too tall, the empire too big, or did that healthy community become a cancer...?

April Prompt
April Showers!

James pulled his hood tighter over his head as a sudden gust of wind sent a spray from the falling rain into his face. It was always this way in what they called April here. Neither the smaller, paler, moon visible ahead nor its larger sister set the calendar. Instead, the inhabitants of Bright Hope kept the old earth calendar with an extra odd-sized month tacked on. April might have been a naturally rainy month, but James didn't know for sure - the colony's minders never left such things to chance. Up above, an old-fashioned cloud-seeding drone made sure that James's walk in the part was a wet one. Some people filled their exercise requirements indoors on days like this, but he had paid to settle on a colony with a breathable atmosphere and an open sky. James refused to be cheated out of the outdoors.

That was why James was the only one to see the bright red streaks in the sky with his own eyes.

"Holy - "

He cut off. Those were showers, alright, but not rain showers. He didn't know if those were natural meteors or an assault from the bugs. Either way, today had just gotten a lot worse.

March Prompt:
What combines magic, High Technology, Evil corporations, Dystopian governments, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, and Dragons?
On the bleeding edge between over-the-top science fiction and over-the-top fantasy lies - Cyberpunk! It may be getting crazy out there in the real world - this month's winner will explain how crazy is just the beginning!

February Prompt: Lost in Space

From the Robisons to L.E. Modesitt's "The Fall of Angels," in movies, books, or computer games such as Rimworld or Stranded: Alien Dawn, being lost or shipwrecked is a common trope of science fiction - and fruitful ground for the imagination. Whether your character is truly lost or just stranded (as in Andy Weir's "The Martian"), how are they surviving? And are they ever reaching home?

January Prompt:
Time Travel!

A staple of science fiction, time travel can be a clever way to mix the fantastic and the familiar - or it can be where plot goes to die. This month's contest theme is time travel, but with a caveat: time loops are impossible because you can't visit your own past. At best, you can travel to a parallel universe that has quite caught up to the timeline in this one. But that one you can change!

"You can't change the past, Charles. At least, not your past. But it doesn't mean you have to stay here. Here, humanity will the price for its shortsightedness, its hubris. You can't save us all. But you can make sure there's a world somewhere that doesn't have to, and I'll take some comfort in that."

The brown-haired young man shook his head. "Why me? I'm still in school. Shouldn't you choose someone with a little more experience to save the world?"

The middle-aged man's cheeks crinkled as he smiled. "I told you: we can't save the world, not this one. But if there's a chance that anyone could see a world with more hope, well I'm just selfish enough to want to send my son. Even if there were time to recruit someone else for my little project. But the news has been wrong - there's no time left even to talk about it. I only wish there was more time to prepare. Step in the chamber, and know that I love you."

Charles warily looked over the glass and metal capsule. It was something like a beached personal submarine and something like a steampunk mining pod. "I - when are you sending me to, Dad?"

"New York, in about 2025. That should give you a few years before it all happens. The alternate timeline should fork off immediately. Or, if some of the theories are correct, it's already there, and I'm just sending your consciousness into it. Either way, it's time to go - now!"

Charles sighed, and stepped inside. Tears had begun to streak down his father's dusty face. "I love you too."

Everything faded into a blinding white light, and then it began.

December Prompt:

It's the end of the world as we know it... so what happens next? World-ending (or near-world ending) disasters are foreshadowed by films such as Armageddon, Deep Impact, a plethora of Zombie movies, and in dozens of books and games. Will we hide underground as in "Wool" or the "Fallout" series? Will we desperately send people to space after all? Or will the destruction be as total as in Horizon Zero Dawn?

The big asteroid is coming and we can't deflect it. So - what does a technologically advanced earth do? The winning entry for December will show us what lies ahead...

Jared's face twisted in a sneer. "What do you mean we can't do anything about it? We've cured cancer! We've created virtual world where we live 100s of years! We defeated AI! Crime is a novelty for people who spend too much time searching news sites! You're saying we can't knock one asteroid off course? Space agencies first proved they could do that with Dart back in 2022!"

Quy's own avatar shrugged uncomfortably. "This one's big, it's coming fast, and it's not icy. Our non-proliferation treaties said we couldn't put weapons in space, and we didn't. I'm surprised you know about Dart: everyone else seems to have forgotten space entirely, including the failed mission to Mars and how the Earth First movement scrapped all but the lightest and most rudimentary asteroid mining ships. We don't have anything in space big enough to move a rock that's kilometers across, and the closer it gets the harder you'd have to hit it to make it miss. We don't have time to build something big enough soon enough to intercept it. It'd be easier to send people to Mars than that."

"How did we not see this coming earlier? They're predicting impact in less than three months?"

Quy's face, obscured by her ninja mask, turned downward. "Somebody messed up, I guess. But it's a dark object and space is big. We can't stop it. I guess the only question is: what else can we do?"

November Prompt:
Aside from an uptick in work, one of the things stealing my time and attention in the past month was a computer game called Terra Invicta. In an interview, Stephen Hawking said, "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."
Neil deGrasse Tyson commented that aliens have probably already found humans, but have good reason to keep us from seeing them. Most scientists agree that if humans were to end up in a fight with aliens any time soon, the aliens would win handily. This presumes, of course, that sapient life exists elsewhere in the galaxy, or elsewhere in the universe: as of now, an entirely speculative concept.

In science fiction, conflict with aliens is a staple. In George Lucas's Star Wars universe and Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe, some aliens are hostile, but most are friendly can be met on something like equal terms. Written fiction and computer games tend to be a little bleaker on the topic. In David Weber's Safehold series, a star-spanning empire of humans is wiped out, but not before founding a hidden civilization whose chief religious tenet is to avoid achieving the kind of technology that would attract alien eyes. In Brandon Sanderson's YA novel, Skyward, human beings are notoriously aggressive, and so are corralled into a few preservation areas where they endure constant conflict to keep them from re-founding a threatening and militaristic empire. Harder science fiction, as written by Arthur C. Clarke, makes aliens inscrutable, beyond us, and mostly benevolent.

But in the game Terra Invicta, the aliens come to "domesticate" earth, a planet that is threatening to grow out of hand. Earth, rather than uniting against the external threat, spends most of its resources on internal conflict. And yet - if the player is savvy enough (and doesn't choose a faction that sides with the aliens), a long and difficult road to victory is available. Despite the ongoing change in climate and energy crisis that threatens human earthbound economies.

But they're all wrong, of course! This month, your entry can tell us how human encounters with aliens will *really* go!

TLDR: November's Prompt: write a short story explaining the interaction between human societies and aliens.

October 2022 Prompt
One of the most common and fruitful themes within Science Fiction is speculation the nature and application about Artificial Intelligence (AI). From stories about mechanical men and the Three Laws of Robotics to the dark fantasies of Westworld or Ex Machina, we have constantly wondered what our interaction with AI would look like, and what capabilities it would have. In this category, science is quickly racing to meet the fiction. Ray Kurzweil is holding fast to his prediction that large language models will pass the Turing Test in all respects by 2029. However, some believe we've passed that threshold even today: Google engineer Blake Lemoine is reputedly seeking legal representation for chatbot LaMDA, to win it rights as a person. Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and many other influential figures in the tech industry tell us we are fast approaching the singularity and that the best way to remain relevant as human beings is to interface directly with AI - to place it within our brains. Jon Scalzi, in Old Man's War, gives us one vision of what that would look like, in a dark and militaristic future where Humanity fights for its place among the stars.

This month's prompt: share your story about human-AI interaction. How will we deal with AI? How will we include it in our lives - perhaps within our own minds?