Wednesday 28 January 2009

Concept Sci-Fi Short Story Competition

Concept Sci-Fi magazine has launched its first annual short story competition. Prize is £100, plus assorted "goodies" from sf author and competition judge Sean Williams. Entry fee is £3.50, and all short-listed entries will be published in a special edition of the magazine. Deadline is 15th June 2009. All entries must "conform to the following theme":

Frank Zappa once said that everything in the universe is part of one great big note. He wasn't far wrong. There's music in the earth's core, in the sun's atmosphere, even in the roiling fire of the Big Bang. There's music in our interior lives too, in the stories we tell. "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable", according to Leonard Bernstein, which makes it a perfect tool in the writing of space opera--my true but not my only love.

Way back in the late 1980s, I had to choose between two lives: one writing words and another writing notes. In an alternate universe, there's a version of me beavering away at a new symphony, or the score to a Hollywood movie. Here, the closest I get is putting Gary Numan lyrics in the mouths of my characters, and dreaming.

Dream for me. Tell me the note that ripples through spacetime in the wake of an ftl cruiser. Convey to me the songs that alien cephalopods whistle in their jovian soup. Give me the music of the spheres as you hear it. When the echoes fade, we'll all be richer for it.

See here for more details.

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