Who can compete with The War of the Worlds? (Image: Everett Collection/Rex Features) Neil Gaiman: Imagining the future (Image: Darryl James/Getty)

Please note that this competition is now closed and the winner, runners-up and shortlisted entrants are being published on our CultureLab blog.


This week, New Scientist goes in search of lost classics of science fiction – brilliant books that could stand alongside The War of the Worlds and Nineteen Eighty-Four as masterpieces of speculative literature, but have somehow or other lapsed into obscurity. Each is a forgotten vision of the future.

Now we’d like to read yours. Send us your very short stories about futures that never were. Tell us where we’d be today if the ether had turned out to exist after all, or if light really was made up of corpuscles emitted by the eyes. You don’t have to be scientifically accurate, but the more convincing your story, the more likely it is to win!

Neil Gaiman, the best-selling author of American Gods, Coraline, Sandman and many more comics and books, will pick a winner from a shortlist selected by New Scientist editors. “I’m a sort of failed SF writer,” says Gaiman. “I read New Scientist every week in the forlorn hopes that it will turn me into a proper SF writer at last. I’m excited to judge the flash fiction finalists, certain that they will do better than I would…”

The winning entry will be printed in the special end-of-year issue of New Scientist and we’ll publish the most entertaining and thought-provoking runners-up online. (You can read last year’s winners here.)

Your story should be no more than 350 words long, including the title – do watch your word count, we hate having to disqualify good competition entries because they’re just a bit too long – and should not have previously been published anywhere else. Only one entry per person, please.

Here’s the small print: the upshot is that by submitting your story you give us non-exclusive rights to publish it now or at any future date, in whatever medium we choose. The closing date is 19 November 2010.

We look forward to reading your stories!