Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Dell Award for Undergraduate Science Fiction Writing

This past fall marked the third time that Professor Jay Clayton and I taught our Vanderbilt seminar on science and science fiction. As a final exercise, the students usually choose to write their own short stories. (They also have the option of writing a "popular science" article or a critical essay, but only one student has chosen this in the entire history of the class!) We've always entered the best of the students' stories in the competition for the Dell Award for undergraduate science fiction writing. This year, our students took first place and third place in the competition!

Rani Banjarian received first place for "Lullabies in Arabic," and Laura Davia got third place ("second runner-up") for her story, "Get Out of Here."  Rani's story will be published in Asimov's Science Fiction, and I've encouraged Laura to submit her story for publication -- it's definitely publishable.

3 comments:

Priya Palande said...

Congratulations to your students! Is there a way we can get to read them somewhere?

Robert Scherrer said...

You can't post stories online if you hope eventually to publish them. But Rani's story will be published in Asimov's, and I am confident that Laura will be able to post her story somewhere. I'll post publication information on this blog when the stories get published.

Kathy said...

Congratulations!

Why not combine the article angle with a story, by writing a spoof article? The idea is to write it well as an article, but to use SF-type science. Like Asimov did a spoof of a doctoral dissertation using a substance, thiotimoline, which dissolved a fraction of a second before it was added to the water.