There is something depressing about a competition that no one enters. It’s a little like a party that everybody forgets to attend: the disappointed hostess, still wearing her best cocktail dress, slips off her shoes and carries untouched hors d’œuvre back to the kitchen. With a similar image in mind, I couldn’t help but feel glum when I read the news this week that Reg Turnill, the sponsor of a short-story competition aimed at young H. G. Wells fans in England, was forced to extend the contest deadline and revise its requirements because he hadn’t received a single entry. The competition was first held last year in connection with the inaugural H. G. Wells festival in Folkestone, Kent, near the small village of Sandgate where the author lived for thirteen years. In 2009, Turnill received twenty-five entries and the committee chose “The Invaders from Within” by thirteen-year-old Will Jarrett as the winner. This year, no one, it seemed, could be bothered to compete for the £1,000 prize.

Turnill, a ninety-four-year-old former BBC aerospace correspondent who once interviewed Wells, fears that would-be competitors were discouraged by a new rule he added this year: no science-fiction allowed. Last year’s competition brought in too many stories “depicting ghastly invasions of our everyday lives by all sorts of nameless horrors,” Turnill told Kent News. Though the curmudgeon in me gets a kick out of this blithe dismissal of the genre, banning science fiction from a competition honoring H. G. Wells does seem slightly unfair. After all, Wells wrote some pretty good “ghastly invasion” stories, didn’t he?

But the no sci-fi decree isn’t the only change from last year. While the first competition was open to writers of any age, this year’s £1,000 prize must go to someone under the age of twenty-five—preferably a student from one of Kent’s schools or universities. Perhaps it’s the two rules together that caused the dearth in entries: among adolescent readers and writers, science fiction seems to hold mysterious and perennial allure. (At one point in my youth, after devouring books by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, I wrote a bleak story about a former bug-killer who must battle a spider queen after being shrunk to the size of an ant.) Or maybe young writers, when compared to their more mature (and hungry) counterparts, simply aren’t as desperate for the £1,000. A separate competition category for writers twenty-six and older has received no shortage of entries, despite the somewhat less impressive £250 prize.

If not aliens and time travel, then what is a young H. G. Wells admirer meant to write about? The brochure for this September’s H. G. Wells festival offers these wonderfully peculiar guidelines:

Stories should give readers in 2110 an idea of what life is like for ordinary people, working or retired, in the second decade of the 21st century—its complications and perplexities, and above all its humorous aspects. HG’s characters described the misery and humour of apprenticeship in a draper’s emporium. There must be both fun and drudgery working in a supermarket or MacDonald’s. Is this or back-packing a better way to fill in the time between college and university? And what is it like if you don’t go to university? Plumbing is said to be a well-paid alternative—and always good for a laugh. And how does it feel to be made redundant—all too familiar in 2010, but hopefully less well-known in 2110? There are plenty of non-sci-fi stories waiting to be written.

Do young writers have much to say about workday drudgery and what it means to “be made to feel redundant”? Is plumbing always good for a laugh?

I’m no doubt making too much of all this. Folkestone seems to be a very small place, and this is a very new competition attached to a very new festival. It’s possible that no one entered the short story competition simply because no one really knew about it. Still, Turnill blames his own strict rules. After the original competition deadline rolled around this week, he caved and announced that he would consider science fiction entries after all.

The under-twenty-five rule remains firm, but Turnill has also softened an earlier requirement that all the stories be handwritten. “I wanted people to write the stories by hand as a condition of entry to address the low standard of literacy and handwriting these days,” he explained. Though this request is strangely old-fashioned, I doubt that it’s what deterred young writers from applying. It may be true that we all should spend a little less time gazing at screens, but I would suspect that most twenty-first century competitors would do the work of composing and editing the story on a computer before copying out the finished product by hand. In fact, Mike Umbers, the seventy-two-year-old runner-up for last year’s prize, later admitted to having done just that. (I confess that this is also my method for writing thank-you notes and other important personal correspondence.) Now handwritten stories will receive bonus points, but typewritten ones will be accepted as well.

Because I don’t like to picture Turnill—whom I imagine to be a bookish, grandfatherly type in a bow-tie—shuffling out to an empty mailbox each morning, I hope that he finds himself buried in wonderful short stories before it’s time to announce a winner at the second annual H. G. Wells festival this September. Perhaps the (modest) hubbub over the initial lack of entries will inspire hundreds of young writers to send Turnill their masterpieces. Who knows? Maybe he’ll open one or two envelopes to find sparkling, alien-free vignettes and piercing commentary on the times—all rendered in perfect Edwardian script, of course.