Science Fiction Microstory Contest discussion
***JUNE 2016 MICRO STORY CONTEST - COMMENTS ONLY
Addition for June's competition:With the group's permission, I would like to gift a copy of my sci-fi novellas (part I and part II) to the winner. If you are in the U.S., I can gift it to you through Amazon. Otherwise I can send PDF's to those abroad.
but if we do we can just modify one of the examples given at that link "e.g., Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental ... Especially you, Jenny Beckman ... Bitch." Yes?
Justin wrote: "Addition for June's competition:With the group's permission, I would like to gift a copy of my sci-fi novellas (part I and part II) to the winner. If you are in the U.S., I can gift it to you thr..."
--one vote of permission, Justin. I can't imagine anyone's agin' it.
Thank you! I just thought it would be fun to offer something up to the next winner. I also want to respect the group and not commercialize it or use it heavily for self-promotion. Lots of great writing here and I'm just happy to be a small part of it.
My story's up. The rain , and the accident and its aftermath are made up; the rest is history.
Okay Andy, I have to plead ignorance. I have no idea who the characters are. Sonny? Norma (a young Marilyn Monroe?) Very sad though and poignantly written.
Remember to write crap Justin, if you can- would not be advantageous to win your own book.
Idea- If Justin wins we all send him a book, or other artful gift.
Spot on, RIchard!If Justin wins, he can have a copy of my book.
Second place gets 2 copies ... :-)
I am very troubled by the concept of having a real person in an alternative history, because the moment one acts elsewhere one changes oneself. Adolf Hitler would not be recognizable as the evil he was, he might still be evil but he wouldn't be the person recorded by history. Our genes are expressed differently with the minutest of change, let alone if we are placed in a different story. Time may change me, but I can't change time and be me.
How to keep someone, a someone everyone thinks they know, as that real person in a changed history is a hard ask.
Andy wrote: If Justin wins, he can have a copy of my book.
Second place gets 2 copies ... :-)"
What does last place win? I'm a bit worried already. (But then I could sell them on ...and, if the habit catches on, make a small home based business out of it!)
Great idea Heather- You might be so good as to sell my books as well, I can't. The alternative history of book marketing begins, um- began.
You cannot libel the dead, at least here in the USA, so I recall.
Richard wrote: "Remember to write crap Justin, if you can- would not be advantageous to win your own book."LOL! No, I already have copies on my phone. :)
Andy wrote: "Justin, I am Sonny in my story."Andy, not to get too personal, but did you come down with polio, or was that the change in your timeline? I'm glad the accident was fictitious because that just hurt my heart!
Richard wrote: "Great idea Heather- You might be so good as to sell my books as well, I can't. The alternative history of book marketing begins, um- began."I'm happy to read anyone's published work and post a review. Just send me the title and I'll pick it up.
Justin - Yes, I didn't get back to schoool until the following May. I was in fact very fortunate as my only problem was that I couldn't walk, and I recovered pretty much completely. For those very few of us of a certain age who might remember the name, I underwent the Sister Kenny course of treatment. I developed post-polio syndrome in my mid-40s for a few years, when it became somewhat painful to walk more than about 50 steps at a time. Apparently it will recur yet again, so I now have something to look forward to in my mid-80s. Thanks for your interest.
Richard wrote: "I am very troubled by the concept of having a real person in an alternative history, because the moment one acts elsewhere one changes oneself. Adolf Hitler would not be recognizable as the evil he..."Hi Richard,
I thought I was keeping it fairly simple and straightforward. Here are some examples I hope illustrate what I'm looking for:
1) JFK bends over in the limousine to pick up Jackie's handkerchief, thereby avoiding Oswald's bullet. He lives and reduces the US involvement in Vietnam, changing US history forever.
2) President Lincoln's bodyguard foils Booth's assassination attempt. Or perhaps Mrs. Lincoln had a headache and they did not go to Ford's theatre. Lincoln's policy of forgiveness and reconciliation brings the South softly back into the Union.
3) General Custer decides to bring the Gatling guns he originally left behind and survives Little Big Horn. He goes on to become a larger than life figure and is elected president. His egomania drives him to build a wall with Mexico and make them pay for it...oh wait...
I know these are all U.S. centered events, so my apologies to all of the non-U.S. members. Your history is just as critical, I just don't know it!
I hope this helps!
Heather wrote: "but if we do we can just modify one of the examples given at that link "e.g., Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental ... Especially you, Jenny Beckman ... Bitch." Yes?"I'm sensing a story in there Heather! LOL!
Andy wrote: "Justin - Yes, I didn't get back to schoool until the following May. I was in fact very fortunate as my only problem was that I couldn't walk, and I recovered pretty much completely. For those very ..."Then I think your story is even more amazing for the way you have woven your own personal history into it. Thank you for sharing it!
Justin - Re the Kennedy assassination, if you haven't already done so, you might consider Stephen King's "11/22/63". It is a time travel story about a guy who goes back in time to prevent the assassination. The novel is at least 50% too long, esp. the first part, but King came up with something I had never seen before. He envisions the events that happen in our world to be a kind of norm or standard. One can change them, only to discover that the world has a certain elasticity about "wanting" to return to events as they occurred in our world. I was quite impressed with how he plays it all out.
I've heard about that and have wanted to watch the mini-series on HULU. Perhaps I should read the book first. The elasticity of the timeline, and having it snap back into place after a disruption can certainly be an aspect of this month's theme.
Jack, great story. I had an inkling that's where you were going. Nicely done.Reminds me of the scene in "Interstellar" when they are discussing the moon landings in school and how they were a ruse to ruin the Soviet economy and never really happened. Meanwhile Matthew Mcconaughey's character is looking at them like they've grown a third eye...
I thinking of changing history so that Spanish and English, um- mostly Scottish and Irish, never went across the pond. Then if the Indians never left Asia, we need not have any people in the America's at all. Well, perhaps few Vikings- cos they wouldn't have been killed by the injuns. I think it would be really nice for wildlife if the Americas were just a huge great nature reserve, managed by Olaf and Grimhilda.
Here's a case of a couple of inches to one side or another that could have changed world history - http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ul...I think it's been used a few times though.
I believe that Connie Willis uses the "elasticity of time" trope (!) in Blackout and All Clear--not sure if those came out before or after the King book (which, imao, was, rather, 2-3 times too long, though, yes, mostly in the first parts).Justin, is your reviews offer for books other than sf, too? It's a very generous offer, in all events.
Hi Paula, yes it is. Although I have to draw the line at romance novels. :) I will say that a lot of my reading is sci-fi and history (especially military history) but I'm certainly open to other genres. My offer still stands.
The 'elasticity of time ' trope sounds suspiciously like Trotsky's view of historical determinism - events might temporarily derail the course of history but compensating accidents of history will bring it back on track
wonder what'd have happened, Andy, if when that guy, Trotsky, was in Mexico, you know, . . .Justin, thanks!
Sorry - I published my story about four times- on my learning curve of how to put italics into comments- so multiple e notices for some. I hope you think it was worth it. The story was hard to comprehend without italics for thought.
... and here I was thinking it was REVENGE! (I know how much you hate the noise of superfluous postings, Richard :-) )
Okay, instead of working I wrote and posted mine and then I read the other 3. Zounds. Seriously amazing stuff so far. If I were running a major sf journal, I'd be grabbing these, right and left. Seriously.
Richard, I love that idea! A boatload of Vikings, maybe a few Inuit up north, and 'the wide open country' with its megafauna still rampant. My own thoughts are going, of course, to antiquity - what if Alexander hadn't died that time in Babylon, but gone on to conquer the lands west of Greece?
Paula, don't tempt me! Exam stuff needs to be done (ok, I confess, I have started writing notes. And a draft.)
I thought of Alexander Dorthe- but didn't want to tread on your classic toes. It's those delicate Greek sandals. In the end I went for Adolf Hitler- trying to save some of the humanity it is reasonable to assume he was born with. I'm a bit worried though, because the one of us that goes furthest back changes history for all that follow. That could seriously upset any chance of stories after 300 BC being strictly logical.
We are also in danger of even changing the course of events on Goodreads, Indeed, does Goodreads now exist?
In case of interest, I did put comments on the stories in the May contest "comments" thread.
Richard, please don't mind my toes - there's enough of history, even ancient, to go around :o) As for changing history, this month should create a spate of new parallel universes, so everything's possible, even Hitler being humane.
In some of these 'verses, Goodreads does exist, in others, it's called Bücherwelt.
By the way, have any of you read Kate Atkinson's Life After Life and the companion/sequel A God in Ruins? They both play around with alternate versions of a life, basically the what-happens-if-you-turn-left-instead-of-right. Not so much changing history, more of the 'how would my life have been, if I had made the other choice?' that we all (I suppose) think about from time to time.
Andy - Re your comment above about Trotsky's determinism. I might think that with a personal life filled with being on the run, getting jailed, finally on the run halfway around the world only to be assassinated in Mexico by a Stalinist, I think it likely that the events of Trotsky's peronal life had more than a little influence on any formal pholosophy of not being quite able to avoid Fate/ One's Enemies
Dorthe,I wondered what "Bücherwelt" must mean ... thinking along the lines of it meaning "Bookworld". So I put it into the 'translate from German to English box at translate.com and it came back as "Bücherwelt" !!
So I went to italki.com https://www.italki.com/question/355528 and found someone had asked for its meaning withinin the meaning of an entire sentence sentence (or perhaps a famous quote?) viz.,
"Weil aber für jede herausgelesene Figur jemand aus der realen Welt in die Bücherwelt verschwinden muss"
which, from the combined efforts there at italki, seems to mean
"... but, someone from the RealWorld must disappear into Bookland, for each character extracted-by-reading (i.e., extracted from 'a story being read/told' in order to go into the 'imaginary reality/the imagination of the reader, created for the reader by the story' {presumably} )..."
It sent shivers up my spine when I got that meaning, like the 'dark-poetic' justice within a Nordic Noir and Grimm's Fairy Tale combined ... to re-establish a 'balance.'
Goodness knows what added 'cost' will be added for such an extra twist of the knife required this month to 'extract-by-writing' a character - from RealHistory into ScienceFictionUnreality. We'd all better pack for several possibilities at the, multi-sign posted "Alternate Journeys" for the Month of May(be), crossroads!
Thanks for posting the names of those books. I'm going to go and check them out on Amazon.
If its true that we are all here on Earth to learn from and to teach each other something needed for another time and place (as I tend to believe we probably are) I think that one of my life lessons has been to learn how to stand firmer in the face of forces at the crossroads where I've known I should have probably gone left instead of right or visa versa, but felt at the time I had no choice. But having had the experience of a sibling who is absolutely unyielding once she makes a 'crossroads' decision - and seen the tragedy that causes (not for her but for others affected by her decisions) - I am also unsure about the value of 'standing firm.' So maybe my lesson is to learn when to stand firm in a direction-to-go-in decision, and when not to!
[I've been reading a little bit about Alan Turing and 'the Decision Problem' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entsche... I think it sort of comes out - regarding interpreting it in Real Life - as not everything is effectively calculable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effecti... because we just can't get everything to stay in the same or compatible categories of things, as they would need to be for us to make a right or wrong "yes I should have" or "no I shouldn't have" decision, at some given time and place. I think now maybe a lesson for me, re such crossroads, is: to just not get lazy about it; to keep thinking it through (but only while that 'thinking through' process is sort of like a creative work in progress); but also don't get exhausted by it ... and trust Fate (at least to some extent.)]
I suppose the saying "we live in interesting times" applies particularly to those who 'more often than might be the norm' find themselves at such crosswords.
My story's up. (And, for the record, I used Wikipedia plenty!)
Wow, Heather, you took that one to a whole new level! The interchange of reader and read (character) puts a Gaimanesque spin on reading ... And here I was, merely plodding along the path of 'what if German had become the language of the new colonies across the pond?' AFAIK, back in the 17somethings, it was pretty much a coin-toss between English and German as the, well, common if not official, language. That would obviously have had repercussions, not least in WWII.
Thought it would've been Navajo or Haudenosaunee or Cree or something back then, Dorthe. :)
I had no idea that a guy called Muhlenberg even ever existed, until now when I googled this strange (to me) notion that German might have become the language of America! I had never heard of that! Where did the Germanic influence even come from? From googling - so far - I can't really find that out. Were the early English settlers from The MayFlower Germanic in origin? Was part of their persecution in England because of that and not just religious? (Is that why the Amish speak German?)
p.s. I got the Kindle sample of Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life." Brilliant! ... and I will soon buy the whole thing.
Also I didn't know what "Gaimanesque" meant so googled that too and got, first off, https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comm... where someone says
"I'm in the mood for a specific type of fantasy (kind of urban fantasy?) where there are two worlds, the modern world as we know it and a nearby magical world. ..."
In a way "Life After Life" (as much as I've read of it so far) has that feel - but not two (or more) worlds separated by degree of real vs magical, but by 'the chance of this' vs 'the chance of that.'
This is one key reason this group is such an exciting place to visit: there's always another signpost or two (or a million) with the words "Explore Down This Avenue!" blazed across it/them.
Oh Tom, you are making me feel so guilty! Not because your story's so good--it is, it's terrific!--but because hey, maybe I too should've checked an encyclopedia--not sure that Polish king's name, or whether he was in fact 14th century or were there more than one who, etc.. . .but of course there was/were in this particular universes-line. By the way, people, if the history in my story confuses anyone, or that "g" word's unknown to you, feel free to message me.
Thank you kindly, Paula. You're making me feel guilty; being half Polish, I should know more about the history myself. On behalf of my father's side of the family, thank you for choosing Poland, and for giving the history your usual poetic potency. Richard's story made a good inadvertent companion piece, following the long, tragic history of the Jews. I had it easier - I had probably the most famous main characters in history. All I had to do was look up dates. The hard part was converting those dates to alternate timeline points of reference (since A.D. and B.C. no longer applied.)
Yep, Tom, those dates in yours were pretty cool. And thank you for the kind compliment.
You're so right re Richard's piece--and he's done a fine job with it; I did an alternate-history-of-Adolph once and it's not easy to do one that's not trite, but he's well succeeded.
** COMMENTS ONLY**
The theme for the month follows this note from the competition's Creator/Director, Jot Russell:
To help polish our skills and present a flavour of our art to other members in the group, I am continuing this friendly contest for those who would like to participate. There is no money involved, but there is also no telling what a little recognition and respect might generate. The rules are simple:
1) The story needs to be your own work and should be posted on the Good Reads Discussion board, which is a public group. You maintain responsibility and ownership of your work to do with as you please. You may withdraw your story at any time.
2) The stories must be 750 words or less.
3) The stories have to be science fiction, follow a specific theme and potentially include reference to items as requested by the prior month's contest winner. The theme for this month is posted below.
4) You have until midnight EST on the 22nd day of the month to post your story to the Good Reads Science Fiction Microstory Contest discussion. One story per author per month.
5) After, anyone from the LI Sci-Fi group or the GR Science Fiction Microstory Discussion group has until midnight EST of the 25th day of the month to cast a single private vote to Jot Russell () for a story other than their own. This vote will be made public once voting is closed. Voting is required. If you do not vote, your story will be disqualified from the contest. You don't need a qualifying story to cast a vote, but must offer the reason for your vote if you don’t have an entry.
6) To win, a story needs at least half of the votes, or be the only one left after excluding those with the fewest votes. Runoffs will be run each day until a winner is declared. Stories with vote totals that add up to at least half, discarding those with the fewest votes, will be carried forward to the next runoff election. Prior votes will be carried forward to support runoff stories. If you voted for a story that did not make it into the runoff, you need to vote again before midnight EST of that day. Only people who voted in the initial round may vote in the runoffs.
7) Please have all posts abide by the rules of Good Reads and the LI Sci-Fi group.
8) Professional comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated by any member in either group and should be posted to the separate thread that will be posted at the end of the month and all voting is complete to avoid any influence on the voting. Feel free to describe elements that you do and don't like, as these help us gain a better perspective of our potential readers. Remarks deemed inflammatory or derogatory will be flagged and/ or removed by the moderator.
9) The winner has THREE days after the start of the new month to make a copy of these rules and post a new contest thread using the theme/items of their choosing. Otherwise, the originator of the contest, Jot Russell, will post a new contest thread.
______________________________
*Theme for the June 2016 contest:
Theme: Alternate history (From any time period you prefer on Earth, excluding time machines, time travel or alien intervention)
Required Elements: A discrete historical figure (Abraham Lincoln, Cleopatra, Frank Sinatra, whomever – but it must be a real person), a thunderstorm (literal or figurative), and terror/panic