Show HN: Write sci-fi, promote science, and win prizes
dotscifi.com
dotscifi.com
Sci-Fi has a strong vein of criticism throughout it's history. A lot of Sci-fi is a critique of modern society, including the potential consequences of a technology, the overreach of business/companies, and failed ethics in research labs.
If there is a sponsor, how separate will the judging of the story be from the topic of story and the sponsors? If the sci-fi story is very critical of something like CRISPR, if a CRISPR related company is the sponsor, how will the sponsorship play into judges decisions? Do judges have complete discretion on what they pick, or is there a final selection that ultimately happens?
Have multiple groups that each choose a winner for each contest. As in, every contest has 5+ winners, not just one. For example:
- One winner decided by public poll
- One winner decided by volunteers that review the stories to help us out
- One winner decided by the sponsor
- One winner decided by a network of related experts. E.g. a bunch of biologists review stories about biology
In this way, I think the worst a sponsor could do is choose a non-negative winner for their own selection. The other 3-4 winners would not be under their influence.
Of course, this may scare away potential sponsors, but in my experience most scientists welcome debate, as the usual state of affairs is getting no attention at all.
I’d say go for two awards at most, let the sponsor choose one and have the other be a jury award. If you can’t persuade some good authors and critics to be on your jury you won’t persuade them to submit stories either.
- We hold sci-fi writing contests on particular scientific and technological topics. Ideally these contests will be sponsored by startups, research labs, and other organizations that want to promote their tech. E.g. a biotech startup sponsoring a contest about biology or CRISPR. Here's the first contest, for example:
https://dotscifi.com/contests/near-future-moon/
- The winners get crypto, cash, or other prizes.
- The stories are then published under a Creative Commons license, making them free to read and share. This will help promote science and tech to a larger audience.
The concept is somewhat similar to SciFutures [1], except that everyone can read the stories and our goal is to promote science and tech, not just create ideas for private companies.
How do you plan on impartially dealing with stories that criticize the technology being promoted by your sponsors?
It doesn't necessarily mean the story is correct - it is science fiction after all - but how will get sponsors with this conflict of interest?
I think the solution will just be to have a variety of funding sources and a variety of ways that winners are chosen. Ideally the “corporate” sponsors won’t be the only sources of prize money, but one among many.
Even then, I don’t really foresee any controversial organizations being a sponsor anyway. More like: engineering company sponsors contest about physics.
Overall, the goal is to create great literature, not write polemics, so I am not particularly worried that this will be an issue. Certainly there is always the chance that the winning story will be harshly critical, but great sci-fi is usually nuanced, not black-and-white.
As a biologist, I'll be a bit snipe - it's because the famous SF authors usually had a background in physics or mathematics (Greg Egan, for example, has a degree in mathematics), while the truly exciting science right now happens in biology :) Personalised medicine, CRISPR, transposon selection, GM, gene drives, ML in biology, genomics, not that much SF happening in that area because again, hard SF usually comes from physics. Think Forward's Dragon's Egg, amazing physics, bad biology (I vaguely remember triple-stranded DNA).
I think solarpunk is coming from a biology-heavy background and we'll see a lot more there.
Some examples of bio-SF would be Bear's Darwin's Radio, on transposons reactivating themselves leading to a new species of humans, or Burke's Semiosis, on first contact with alien intelligent plants. There's also a whole subgenre of Biopunk but I'm not the biggest fan, a lot of the content feels like 90s kneejerk reactions without being well-informed. For example, Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl features the usual 'farmers can't replant their seeds' myth with 90s-style GM-fear mongering.
It sounds like you plan on "publishing" everything that gets submitted. Having read slush before I wouldn't encourage this approach. A huge portion of submissions are simply not ready for publication and even the strongest stories need editing.
- Terrible for readers, as stories are all locked behind paid magazines, most of which have confusing 1995-era websites. There is also no way to see what a story is about before reading it. E.g. I can’t just say, “I want to read sci-fi about biology” and get results. I can’t even fund things I want to read about via the magazine model.
- Terrible for writers, as the process is a black box that takes 2-3 months to get a reply + you only end up getting paid $100, tops. Magazines also usually take the rights to your story.
As a result, the genre is largely a niche thing that scares away outsiders. I wrote a bit about this on the About page. Sci-fi has a huge impact on contemporary and future culture, but I don’t think a century-old magazine model is the way forward.
Instead, our goal is to get enough sponsors that we can pay vastly more than current magazines, while also channeling their content for a positive cause (promoting science.)
> “ It sounds like you plan…”
No, we don’t plan on publishing everything that gets submitted and this is mentioned in the submission form. We explicitly ask if people want us to publish their story, even if they don’t win. I only added the question because we just launched and could use some more content; the ultimate goal is to publish many stories and give rewards for each one.
But, since this seems unclear, I will put this in the FAQ.
Ultimately, the goal is to promote science and tech. To do this, we fund a ton of high-quality, open-access sci-fi while generously rewarding writers that contribute. It’s not to fund the private careers of a handful of professional sci-fi writers in magazines that only a small audience reads.
Even then, I foresee us being a sort of “farm league” where non-professionals can build up an audience and then later sign a real book deal with a traditional publisher (or we will become a better version of that publisher ourselves.)
> Terrible for readers, as stories are all locked behind paid magazines
We must be reading different things. For example, Clarkesworld (https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/) and (https://www.tor.com/category/all-fiction/) Tor make a huge amount of material available.
> the process is a black box that takes 2-3 months to get a reply
Reading slush is hard. Anyone offering non-token payment is going to get buried in submissions. I've discussed this at length with the editor of a top literary magazine. His magazine receives over 40,000 submissions per year. Without a large staff it's simply impossible to handle that volume.
> you only end up getting paid $100, tops
This is market dependent. You're right that most very short fiction won't pay more than $100. The going rate is 8-12 cents per word. Occasionally I've seen markets paying 25 cents per word, like Terraform, but those are outliers.
> Magazines also usually take the rights to your story. ... We explicitly ask if people want us to publish their story, even if they don’t win.
Professional magazines pay authors for rights. They only acquire those rights from people they pay. Without payment, there's no transfer of rights. You should clarify that only published submissions are CC licensed.
> It’s not to fund the private careers of a handful of professional sci-fi writers in magazines that only a small audience reads.
I think you're misunderstanding magazine publishing. Science fiction magazines are the farm league. Publish a few stories and maybe you'll win the lottery with a book deal. To my knowledge the only person in the world making a career out of sci-fi magazines is Neil Clarke.
They make some material available. But there is no downloadable eBook version and in most magazines, it’s impossible to tell what the story is about without reading it. The reading experience is simply not very good.
Our project, on the other hand, is essentially building a huge library of free-to-read, easily navigable fiction on science and tech. Very different from a magazine with some freebies.
> Reading slush is hard…
By black box, I meant that the selection process is basically, “Send it in and hope the owner of the magazine likes it, wait 3 months, maybe get published, earn $100, and be read by a few hundred people.” There’s very little insight into the selection process and essentially zero greater mission, such as promoting interest in science. It’s also almost entirely open-ended random stories, as opposed to our sponsored, narrow focus on particular topics that relate to real world science and tech.
As I mention in a few other comments, the goal here is to build multiple systems of evaluation, not simply have a team of editors read 40,000 submissions and pick the 10 they arbitrarily like. Instead of languishing in obscurity and being rewarded with peanuts, writers will earn 10x the prize amount, get 100x the amount of readers, and support a good cause. Plus, entering a contest in the first place is more transparent and accessible. I really do not see how that is “exploitative” in any way. Nor is it really similar to a magazine.
> You should clarify that only published submissions are CC licensed.
Yes, that is already how we are operating but I will add a clarification that spells it out more clearly. The main concern here is to just make sure they don’t submit the story to a magazine/publisher before we conclude the contest.
> Science fiction magazines are the farm league. Publish a few stories and maybe you'll win the lottery with a book deal
I guess, but again, the amount of people that reads these magazines is basically zero in comparison to the reading public at large. It’s the farm club of a tiny niche genre of books that a small group of people read, not the farm club of literature that can be read by anyone in the world online. The purpose of this project is to promote science and tech to a broad audience, so almost by definition we need to make stories accessible.
In our view, the magazine model is simply outdated, inefficient, and bad for everyone – for the reasons that I mentioned above.
Regardless of your intentions, barring significant evidence to the contrary, you're going to be making yet another arbitrary ranking system dressed up as something rigorous.
> The main concern here is to just make sure they don’t submit the story to a magazine/publisher before we conclude the contest.
Just make it clear that you don't allow simultaneous submissions. https://duotrope.com/guides/simultaneous-submissions.aspx
Handing out multiple prizes would help, to this end. Hope to see sponsorships contribute soon.
- Limitations spark creativity. I’ve read a lot of good short stories under 1,000 words (Kafka was great at this)
- Just keeping things accessible for the first contest.
- A lot of people (myself included) don’t have time for 500 page epics anymore. Shorter stories fit into life more easily.
Future contests will have longer limits, but I think 10,000 max is still probably a good idea.
When writing my post, I imagined a limit of 2k, maybe 5k being nice. But I see you are going in that direction anyway, thanks for explaining!
https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures
Rules are here: https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/other-subs
They often have scientist-authors but also famous names like Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Ken Liu etc.
That being said, I love any new market for SF short stories, so I wish you the best of luck!
How many judges are there?
And Hey... is this some kind of NFT thing?
Only five judges for this first contest. For future contests, the goal is to expand this number. Ideally, I’d like to have multiple winners for each contest, so that each group can choose their favorite:
- Set up a volunteer program where people can read and help review submissions.
- Have the sponsor pick their favorite story.
- Set up a network of experts in each domain that can review and offer feedback. For example, biologists can review stories involving biology.
Edit: should be working now.