We are inviting submissions for the short story competition “Philosophy Through Fiction”, organized by Helen De Cruz (Oxford Brookes University), with editorial board members Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside), Meghan Sullivan (University of Notre Dame), and Mark Silcox (University of Central Oklahoma). The winner of the competition will receive a cash prize of US$500 (funded by the Berry Fund of the APA) and their story will be published in Sci Phi Journal.

Rationale

As philosophers, we frequently tell stories in the form of brief thought experiments. In the past and today, philosophers have also written longer, richer stories. Famous examples include Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Fiction allows us to explore ideas that cannot be easily dealt with in the format of a journal article or monograph, and helps us to reach a broader audience, as the enduring popularity of philosophical novels shows. The aim of this competition is to encourage philosophers to use fiction to explore philosophical ideas, thereby broadening our scope and toolkit.

Eligibility

Short stories that are eligible for this competition must be some form of speculative fiction (this includes, but is not limited to, science fiction, fantasy, horror, alternative history, or magical realism), and must explore one or more philosophical ideas. These can be implicit; there is no restriction on which philosophical ideas you explore.

The story should be unpublished, which means it should not have appeared in a magazine, edited collection, or other venue. It should not be published on an author’s personal website or similar online venue either, at least from the time of submission until the editorial board’s decision, or – if it is published – at least six months after its publication in Sci Phi Journal. (This is a common publishing norm in speculative fiction.)

The competition is open to everyone, regardless of geographic location, career stage, age, or specialization. In other words, it is also open to, e.g., (graduate) students and philosophers outside of academia. We allow only one submission per author. Co-authoring is allowed, in which case the prize can be split. We encourage philosophers who are new at writing fiction. Submissions should be at least 1,000 words and no longer than 7,500 words.

The submission should be accompanied by a brief “Food for Thought” section (maximum word count: 500, not part of the overall word count), where the author explains the philosophical ideas behind the piece. Examples of such Food for Thought sections appear at the end of these stories: Unalienable Right by Leenna Naidoo and Immortality Serum by Michaele Jordan. Evaluation of the quality of the Food for Thought sections will be an important part of the process. There’s a 500 word cap on this section, so please feel free to write something more substantive than what you see in the two examples.

Dates

The deadline for this competition is February 1, 2017. The winner will be announced by March 31, 2017. The winning story will appear in the following issue of Sci Phi Journal.

Submission requirements

Please submit your story to philosophythroughfiction@gmail.com. You can use the same e-mail address for queries.

Your story should be anonymized, i.e.,contain no name or other form of identification. It should have a distinct title (not “philosophy story submission” but e.g., “The Icy Labyrinth”), and it should be at least in a 12-point clearly legible font. The file format should be doc, docx or rtf. Please use the subject line “submission for short story competition” for your e-mail. Attach the story (the filename should be an abbreviated form of your story title, e.g. “labyrinth.rtf”) to the e-mail. The Food for Thought section should be at the bottom of the same document, with a separate header “Food for Thought”. Please include word counts for both the story and the Food for Thought at the top of the document.

Place your full name, institutional affiliation or home address and the full title of your story in the body of the e-mail. We cannot accept submissions past the deadline of 1 February 2017.

We are planning to publish an edited volume of invited speculative fiction philosophy stories. Strong pieces entered into the competition may be considered for this volume. If you do not want your submission to be considered for this volume, please state this explicitly in the body of your e-mail. In the absence of this, we will assume you agree that your story is simultaneously considered for the competition and the volume.

Review process

All stories will first be vetted for basic quality by a team of readers at Sci Phi Journal. Stories that pass this first stage will be sent in anonymized format to a board of reviewers who will select the winning story. The reviewers will examine how effectively the stories explore philosophical ideas. By entering the competition you agree that their decision is final.

Funding

This story competition is supported by a grant from the American Philosophical Association’s Berry Fund for Public Philosophy, and is hosted at Oxford Brookes University.

*

For inspiration, check out recent discussions on the blog about reading and writing philosophical fiction.