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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN, something I've been working on for awhile. Here's how it works:

- 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14958329

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There are many sub-genres in sci-fi that criticize technology for it's downsides.

How do you plan on impartially dealing with stories that criticize the technology being promoted by your sponsors?

I posted a bit about this in another comment. Basically I think we can avoid it by having multiple ways of picking the winners.

Sure, that aligns with the authors, but what do you do when your winner heavily criticizes your sponsor and portrays them in a bad light?

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?

Well, in some sense this is an inevitable problem with any contest that a) has sponsors and b) isn’t just making propaganda.

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.

The submission page has a text box for submitting the story on a Google form. This seems like a bad experience. Can you also allow for submitting via a link to a Google Doc at least to preserve formatting of the text? I think this might be a better experience for the author. Just include an email address that the author should share the google doc with so you get access.

That’s a good idea, thanks. I will update the form to have a link option.

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