For a number of years now I’ve helped out with Alpha, a summer fantasy & science fiction writing workshop for younger writers. Graduates of the workshop were very well-represented among the winners of this year’s Dell Magazines Award for undergraduate science fiction. Congrats to Seth Dickinson, Rebekah White, Sarah Miller, and Emily Tersoff for placing stories in the contest.
By the way, the application deadline for this summer’s Alpha workshop is March 1st, so there’s still time to apply.
I can’t help but be struck by how much of a difference Alpha (and the internet in general) has made for new writers. During my freshman year of college, I placed first in this contest. At that time I had been writing and submitting fiction for years and had never met or even corresponded with anyone who was serious about writing fantasy & science fiction. I actually didn’t even know anyone who was serious about reading fantasy & science fiction. After I got the call telling me I’d won, I strolled down to the frozen pond behind my dorm to play pick-up hockey. My best friend at college was there, and I told him I’d won this contest, and he was kind of like, “Um, that’s cool,” and that was the extent of my plaudits. These days, all the Alpha students (even the ones who attended during different years and have never met) keep in touch and congratulate each other.
I sometimes wonder if people who grew up with the internet can really appreciate how profoundly it used to suck, pre-internet, to be even the slightest bit noncomformist or to have interests that were even the tiniest bit esoteric. Before the internet, my only glimpse into the world of fantasy & science fiction writers was through coming across the very rare author’s introduction that would discuss the writer’s life. These were: An introduction by Isaac Asimov — which appeared in several of his robot novels — in which he discussed the history of robots in science fiction and also how he came up with his Three Laws of Robotics; Robert Asprin’s introduction to his novel Myth Inc Link, in which he discussed the origins of his Myth series, as well as his appendix to the first Thieves World anthology, in which he discussed how he came up with the concept of a shared-world anthology; and the introduction to Larry Niven’s The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton (in which Niven discusses the history of science fiction/mystery stories), and also some of his essays on writing that were included in his N-Space collection. And that was it.
I probably read each of those introductions more than a hundred times. They were all I had … until one day when I discovered, in my high school library, a few massive hardcover tomes that contained a few pages of autobiographical / bibliographical / critical notes on a variety of authors. I photocopied all the entries about science fiction writers — which took forever — and slowly began to assemble a filing-cabinet full of these articles at home, so that I could peruse them at will. Today, of course, you could probably spend a solid year online doing nothing but reading interviews with and reviews of fantasy & science fiction writers and still have barely scratched the surface.
Anyway, yay for the internet, and again, yay for everyone who placed stories in this year’s Dell Magazines Award.
Leave a Reply