Science Fiction Contest III RESULTS · 12:06am Jun 28th, 2024
copied from the forum post below the break:
It's already been five years since the last episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic aired, and even longer than that since the peak of the fandom. That is enough time that the world as it looks like today would have itself counted as a near-future science fiction setting back then, isn't that funny? That even after all this time, a contest specifically for science fiction stories can draw entries in such quantity and quality is truly a testament to the strength of this community.
Narrowing down the 32 entries to the 8 that will appear in this past inevitably leaves plenty of great stories that are worth reading behind. As always, I encourage you all to take a look at some of the others, and I would like to sincerely thank all of you who have already taken the time to read and comment on these entries. You are the heart and soul of these contests!
As for the prize structure, thanks to the generous GaPJaxie, the pool has been increased to $550, distributed like so:
- First Place: $175
- Second Place: $115
- Third Place: $75
- Fourth Place: $50
- Best Concept:[1]: $50
- Best Short Story (<5kw)[2]: $35
- Best Upbeat Story[3]: $25
- Best Story By New Author (Joined ≥2021)[3]: $25
[1] 4th Place for archive purposes
[2] 6th Place for archive purposes
[3] 7th Place for archive purposes
And now, the winners!
Best Story By New Author (Joined ≥2021)
Faulty Connection by EileenSaysHi
Faulty Connection finds the perfect concept to be at the intersection of a Wallflower Blush character study and a science fiction story. It opens up with her on a captivatingly awkward date with Moondancer, painting such a complete picture of Wallflower that one does not even need to have heard of Forgotten Friendship to know exactly who she is. And as the date inevitably crashes down around her, the premise of the story is revealed: It is all a simulation, and Moondancer is an AI-powered VR character.
What follows is Wallflower all-too-easily falling back into her old patterns in this new context, except that this time it’s different because it’s constantly resetting the memory of a program and not a real person, right? It wouldn’t want to remember, right? But as Wallflower grapples with her own awkwardness, the signs that there is more going on here build up, until the tension breaks in a breathtaking outburst.
And the character study continues, now getting to fully center both Moondancer and Wallflower, as well as the now-genuine relationship budding between them. I appreciate two things especially: How perfect Moondancer’s origin fits as how the Equestria Girls counterpart of her pony self would come to be, and how clear it is that Moondancer is neither a human, nor the soul of a human on a computer substrate. Instead, Moondancer has developed desires and aversions—thus wants and pains, thus rights—as an emergent property of being the program that she is.
A wise person (Cold in Gardez) once said that a science fiction story presents a new moral conundrum because of some fundamental change in reality, and Faulty Connection does excellently on that metric. While we are far from that change in reality in real life with our current level of LLM-powered boyfriends, that point sure feels closer now than it did two years ago.
Best Upbeat Story
Any Portal in a Storm by AugieDog
Picture this: she’s a precocious young girl whose mother played a central role in discovering what thread to tug in the fabric of space-time to reach an entirely new universe with fascinating and dangerous secrets within. Other she is a precocious young filly whose mother also did all those things but was additionally a pony the whole time, which had to be comparatively harder given the whole “hooves instead of hands” thing.
They… do not fight crime together, thankfully. Come on. They’re children. But they do boldly and brashly delve into the scientific and metaphysical unknown together, a phrase which here means “disobey their respective mothers and sorta-kinda cause the kind of Interdimensional Incident that earns the capitalization of both words.” Kids will be kids, y’know?
What this all amounts to in practice is a very fun and delightfully fresh take on the ill-defined genre of humans and ponies crossing paths with each other across dimensions, focusing equally on the science of the whole arrangement and on the cross-species alliances (and, not to risk being but to explicitly be on the nose about it, friendships) at its heart. Proof positive that science fiction doesn’t have to be sad or dark to be both engaging as a story and unique in its use of genre conventions, especially if you add some technicolor horses and their biohazardous magic to the mix.
Best Short Story (<5kw)
Memory Bank by Pen and Paper
Man, let’s talk about vignettes, because this story is like a Russian nesting doll filled with them. Vignettes inside vignettes. Vignetteception? (Call me, Christopher Nolan -- I’ve got all sorts of ideas!)
What does that mean? Well, one of the criticisms raised by the judges when we were debating Memory Bank was that it didn’t really feel like a full story, that it was just a segment of one, albeit a segment that punches you in the face from the start and spends its entire short length riding you like you’re a motorcycle in the Mission: Impossible franchise. On the sidewalk, up the stairs, off the cliff.
But look deeper, and the vignettes continue. Memory Bank is about a world where pony society made a very bad decision, deciding en masse to offload memory storage from their puny, meat-based brains to an infallible, triply-redundant cybernetic cloud where they would persist forever, never fading in the way that organic memories so tragically do. A different sort of immortality than we saw in many of our other submissions, but a valid one nevertheless! I can see why ponies -- or humans, as this story is ultimately about people like us -- would decide to upload their memories and trust them somewhere safe and secure, outside their own heads. It’s a vote for a post-human future.
Except, of course, something went wrong. We aren’t privy to the disaster that befell the world of Memory Bank, except that it was called the ‘erasure’. The great, redundant, infallible memory cloud got blitzed, its records erased or disorganized or corrupted beyond repair. In an instant, ponies lost everything about themselves, and we follow Twilight Sparkle, a unicorn who is pretty sure she knows who her father and maybe-brother are, from the pieces of memory she’s been able to stitch back together by viewing snippets of memories -- vignettes, if you will -- and trying to figure out if they belong to her or one of a billion other ponies in the same terrible place.
There’s a second story hinted at in the margins, of social collapse driven by rampant adoption of premature technology and insufficient safeguards. It’s not hard to see the parallels in our world the author was going for. The difference is, in Memory Bank, ponies made a fateful decision to trust a technology with their lives and their very identities. We, presumably, haven’t crossed that rubicon yet, but Memory Bank suggests that when we do reach that bridge, we might be surprised at how many -- and how readily -- people race for the other side.
Best Concept
Twilight's End by MasterThief
There is an inherent difficulty writers face in attempting to describe the alien -- how to make the reader understand something that is meant to be hard to understand.
When writing of the dread Cthulhu, an ancient horror said to drive humans mad merely by the sight of it, Lovecraft provided almost no physical description. How could he? Anything he could describe would be comprehensible to the reader, and throwing out incomprehensible language doesn’t make for a good story.
Science fiction struggles with this problem as well. Make aliens too human, and they feel like humans with superficial changes -- the ‘Star Trek’ view of the universe, where all aliens are actors in rubber masks. Make them too different, and their stories cease to resonate with the human reader, and they occupy a spectrum stretching from irrational animals to incomprehensible forces of nature.
There are few science fiction stories that handle this well. Arrival is a exceptional film in this regard, so is Contact. Some people swear by novels like Revelation Space or Ancillary Justice. But while we’re talking about fanfiction? This story threads that needle wonderfully.
I don’t want to say too much about the details, because this is a heavily plot-driven story and so susceptible to spoilers, but this is all about understanding the alien. After an excellent opening that sucks the reader into the narrative, our little robot Twilight meets an alien species that isn’t much like humans or ponies at all -- but whose nature she gradually comes to understand.
Bridging the gap between species isn’t trivial. There are so many things that are hard for the other party to understand, much less to communicate. How would you convey the concept of “hunger” to a species that doesn’t eat? How would you convey the concept of “romantic love” to a species that reproduces asexually? How would you explain the stars to a species that sees only in infrared, and so believes the sky is dark?
This is what our little robot Twilight must do to save herself, to save her people, and to save the alien she has come to care for. Only with understanding and empathy can they bridge the gap between them, and avert a terrible fate for both their worlds.
This story is charming, high-concept sci-fi I would recommend to any fans of the genre. I look forward to seeing what more this author produces over time, and how their skills and style develop.
Fourth Place
Stella Cetaceae by Novelle Tale and Shaslan
If I had a nickel for every time a fic entered into this contest was about a middle-aged Spitfire struggling to transition from an old world where her natural physical talents reigned supreme to a brave new one she couldn’t decide whether she could bear to be part of, all while unwillingly teamed up with a younger tech prodigy fighting past psychosocial hangups about their own career, I’d have… well, you all know the punchline/reference. Also, two nickels really doesn’t buy anything these days.
Jokes aside, this was a stellar (because, y’know… okay, now all the jokes are firmly shoved to the side) rendition of a near-future spacefaring Equestria, not just because of how intriguing the two characters are both in their own idiosyncrasies and the bond they grow to share with each other in spite of that, but also because it truly is Equestria they hail from: a society where sufficiently advanced magic became indistinguishable from technology, where spaceships were grown like plants and tended delicately in flight like gardens. On top of that, the universe the little ponies travel through is as deeply alien, with all the horror and beauty that implies, as anyone looking for a contained and compelling sci-fi journey could want, including and especially when it comes to the second-act wrinkle that the story’s title teases.
There were a few reasons why we the judges, in our limited but nevertheless supreme wisdom, decided to transmorgrify the “Best Execution” prize into a fourth spot on the proverbial podium, but this story was one of the biggest ones. So what if we couldn’t quite decide what we wanted to be or how locked into our previous convictions we were until the eleventh hour? Spitfire in this story couldn’t either, and it worked out great for her.
Third Place
Rapture by Shrink Laureate
There is a central mystery present throughout Rapture that never quite gets resolved. We are, for a brief few-thousand words, following the last voyage of the starship Relentless, which in better days ferried a crew of both awake and cryogenically frozen ponies across the vast distances of space. The Relentless is our protagonist, a fully sentient AI brain given a starship body, and she narrates the journey to her final port of call -- a graveyard for dying ships.
This would be a melancholy enough premise for a story, but our starship protagonist has a double life. She divides her time between the lonesome tedium of piloting her mortally wounded vessel to its destination and escaping this drudgery by plugging herself into a virtual Equestria, where her friends aren’t dead and she is not a starship but rather the pegasus Graceful Glider. In the virtual world she has companions, possibly a lover, and a body capable of all the sensations mortals are blessed with -- the elation of touch, she calls it. But the greatest treasure waiting for her in the virtual world, for the few minutes each 19.6 hour cycle when she can connect with it, is hope. Hope that a future awaits her other than sailing endlessly through space, a lone island of sentience growing more like the void it drifts through with every passing century.
The alternating scenes and their dual protagonist tell two stories, one rushing towards its end while the other struggles to be born. Each scene is so brief that they would barely qualify as a vignette, but the author is diligent with their prose. They sparkle.
Of the two stories -- of the Relentless and Graceful Glider -- the starship’s was more interesting. It drove the plot forward, and Graceful Glider’s scenes were brief respites from the solitude of space, except for the final scene, which could represent a happy ending of sorts. And how you feel about the ending is important because that is what this story is trying to tell us about: an afterlife, either real or metaphorical; a reward that follows our lifetime of toil.
I’ve always found it interesting that the most popular Science Fiction trope in the MLP fandom -- the Friendship is Optimal verse -- is, at its core, a story about the oldest and most mystical of all human phenomena, the hope for eternal, blissful life after this one. Rapture presents its own answer to that question, avoiding the FiO framework, but what it suggests is broadly similar -- as technology advances, it will become not only possible but inevitable for some people (or things) to live forever. It’s up to us to decide what sorts of forevers are possible.
Second Place
Laws of Motion by mushroompone
Let’s talk about what makes science fiction good.
Culture does not exist independent of technology. Developments in technology change the options open to individuals, which in turn changes society. The printing press kicked off the Renaissance by making books cheap and accessible. The transistor radio enabled the rock and roll revolution, because teenagers could listen to “that devil music” away from their disapproving parents. We are all Bronies, a subculture that could not exist without the internet, and which would have been unimaginable a generation ago.
This is the core of truly great science fiction: the understanding that questions about the future of technology and the future of society are not separate from each other. The sort of sci-fi that deserves to be called a masterpiece shows how people’s beliefs shape how they use technology, but also how the use of technology shapes us. It asks what we might create, and by creating, what we might become.
This story was a masterpiece. I feel privileged to have read it, and in the future when anyone asks me how to write good sci-fi, this one of the pieces I’ll ask them to read.
The world left Spitfire behind.
She has skills that will never be useful again. The techniques she spent years of her life mastering are useless at best, illegal at worst. Foals who once looked up to her call her a stubborn fool, the crazy old mare who won’t live with the times. Her friends have left her. Her neighborhood is being demolished one building at a time.
It will never get better. The skills she treasures, the flying techniques she adores, will only get less useful. The restrictions society places on her craft will only get stricter -- today a polite request, tomorrow an angry notice, the day after that a squad of police to throw her out of her own home. Her best days are behind her.
So all that’s left is for her to live in nostalgia, to endure the rest of her days dreaming of when things were good, until she finally dies, and leaves a world that doesn’t want her.
Humans never change, except when they sometimes do.
The proto-science fiction writers of the 1800s could imagine time travel and animals being uplifted into sapience, but they couldn’t imagine a world where whites and minorities were equals. Science fiction writers of the 1950s could imagine faster than light travel, human cloning, sapient computers, and psychic robots, but they couldn’t imagine a woman being elected president.
Biologically, we aren’t significantly different from the ancient Egyptians, the Indus Valley peoples, the Native Americans, or the Imperial Romans, but our culture is vastly different. When a really good science-fiction writer considers the future, they must ask: what parts of humanity won’t change, and what parts will?
Mushroompone argues that we will always struggle with change, that it is intrinsic to our nature that those who grew up in a certain world will be uncomfortable admitting that world no longer exists.
But then they ask, what if we could fix that? What if you really could start again?
Once, Spitfire would have given anything for her squad. Now, the sight of her squadmates fills her with bitterness.
They’ve surrendered to this disgustingly modern world. The ponies who once were wonderbolts, once were heroes, are going back to school like they were fillies and colts, re-learning how to live, listening to condescending lectures given by ponies half their age. They’ve given up everything they are, and everything they believe in, just to fit in.
Apple Bloom is offering Spitfire the same chance.
She is a pioneer in the field of destiny therapy. With her miraculous new technology, ponies can see the worlds where they made different choices. What if they’d stayed in school or dropped out? What if they’d kissed the girl, or dumped her? What if they’d had a child, or stayed single? What if they had a different special talent?
Through the sight of these worlds, ponies can see that their lives aren’t set in stone, that there are so many other ways things could have gone -- so many other ways things still could go. They can see that they really truely can start fresh.
Apple Bloom wants to show this to Spitfire. To show her that her life doesn’t have to be over, that she can still change and grow.
Spitfire insists she doesn’t want to change, that she’d rather die who she is than live as some alternate version of herself.
But is she actually that stubborn, or just afraid of what change means?
This story hit me like a punch in the gut. I teared up after reading it, and I don’t think that’s just me. It speaks to something universal in the human experience, and it does it through the lens of ponies and classic science-fiction.
This entire contest was worth it just so stories like this one could exist. A must-read for everyone in the fandom.
First Place
In the Latent Space by AltruistArtist
This is my third time trying to write about In the Latent Space, because every time I do, I fall far short of capturing even a spark of its brilliance. This attempt will also fall short, but all that is very thematically fitting.
As another judge said, it was an “absolute triumph of structure and form”. Between the four of us, it was unanimously the most impressive as a work of literature. To me personally, it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. Not just within the domain of fanfiction, but among all works.
I am not equal to the task of reviewing it, so instead I will just talk about a few of its interlocking themes and what they evoked in me.
Curation, as Twilight’s eyes erase the source of her pain: the sight of the deaths of her friends. We are not so far from such an ability ourselves as it seemed before our tools began to see at a resolution we once thought uniquely human. We will learn, as Twilight does, that there are pains that cannot be cut away without cutting away something even more precious. Being her greatest source of pain, her vision dutifully censors the very image of her departed wife, Rarity.
Record, as a section details one of the inspirations for Twilight’s idea. Photography, as a way to immortalize that which was Rarity, but could it really? Even if Twilight could see them, even if she had one for every moment of Rarity’s life, would they stitch back into her again? And couldn’t the same even be said for
Memory, where the image of Rarity still lives in Twilight’s mind, untouched by this effect. But this is cold comfort, as evoking, imagining her form, will cruelly never be the same as seeing her with natural eyes. Among the sections is a recollection of her, from Twilight’s perspective, starting with “Once upon a time in Equestria —”. I must ask myself, how is this anything but an island in a boundless sea of moments unremembered? Yet within its four lines of dialogue, the entire story is contained again.
Modality, as Rarity is remembered not just in image but in voice and scent and breath and touch. The modality of text, as the story expresses itself in a poetry that reads beautifully, but no less easily for its beauty; an achievement in itself. Every section with its own rhythm, every word carefully chosen in its place, coming together to evoke something deeper that straight prose could never reach. Entire worlds contracted into sentences. All of it a showcase of the indomitable power of the written word, able to express what is inexpressible through any other medium.
Mortality, summed up in all its absurdity and cruelty by metaphors that suffuse the text, most often in final sentences. Twilight finds no false peace here. What death destroys is something real, a loss that no platitude can repair, and Twilight’s entire arc is consumed by her struggle against it. Like all life is, until it isn’t.
The latent space, the promise of our new age. Given enough dimensions, one can embed the world. Every concept, every unit of meaning, every thing observable or conceivable or discernible through any modality finding a place in its constellation. “Bearing resemblance, thoughts tombed side by side.”
Descent, what Twilight does into the latent space of her mind, expressed as a poetic sequence of decision boundaries, of curation, as she cuts her way down to the very concept of Rarity in search of her lost image. I could say that this journey evokes Orpheus and Eurydice, knowing that the story deliberately does so by its chapter title.
(But I think that in truth it is also something more universal. Are we not doing the same descent into our own latent space of memory every time we are in remembrance of something lost: a youth we cannot relive, a place we cannot go back to, a departed loved one we will never see again? As much as we may wish it could be, no matter how much we are aided by technology, what is lost can never truly be brought back.)
And what does Twilight find in the latent space? In its final, brilliant stroke, In the Latent Space presents this not in words, but in two images. There, at the end, I learned a fitting lesson: The written word is not unique in its indomitable power, able to express what is inexpressible through any other medium.
(But when does learning from a story end? Of course, like how recalling a memory changes its details every time, the final meaning of a story changes on each read. But realizing that the empty spaces between each section were never truly empty (literally a “hidden layer”!) added something sublime to the subsequent reread, and I recommend that you, too, only realize this after your first read-through like I did.)
It was a privilege to be able to read this piece, and I only wish there were a prize higher than First Place to award it.
And that is a wrap! See you next year for Science Fiction Contest IV! In the meantime, do check out the other currently-running contests below!
- The Sunset Shimmer X Aria Blaze Competition, ending 2024 Jul 07.
- The A Thousand Words Contest III, ending 2024 Jul 14.
- The Tropical Post-Apocalyptic Story Contest, ending 2024 Jul 26.
- The Rainbow Rocks 10th Anniversary Shipping Contest, ending 2024 Aug 03.
An absolutely wonderful and well-deserved slate. Congratulations to everybody!
I've read maybe half of these, which means I have plenty more to check out!
Thank you for running the contest, congratulations to the winners, and a big thank you to everyone who participated!
These all look fantastic, I can't wait to get reading!