Ladies and Gentlemen, the submission date for the Scifi Contest has ended and I am absolutely delighted with the response. We've received around thirty stories for the contest. About ten were received before Sep 15 and the rest in the past two weeks. I am thrilled by the enthusiasm and energy. By any measure, we are onto a fantastic start. The panelists have already started reading the stories.
A word on how the stories will be judged. The method is quite simple. I asked the panelists to supply me with a single rank for every story at the end of their exercise. They would use their own set of measures to arrive at the rank of a story. I personally will use 'science' and 'excitement' as the two measures to rate stories. All the panelists' rankings will be averaged and the winners announced.
Another word about how the stories were presented to the panelists. I prepared and sent a package for the panelists which included the story, the author's name and the author's email. Any note about the story supplied by the author was also included. The author's background was not presented to the panelists so as not to bias them in any way.
The winners would be announced on November 15.
I have a few things planned after the contest winners are announced. To start with, we'll set up the stories for public reading at TheScian.com/scifi. I am hoping to encourage the talented authors we have discovered by asking them for further contributions and enabling print publication of their stories. That's all in the coming months. At the moment though, I have a more pressing matter at hand. I need some coffee.
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