Calling all writers

With just over a week to go, the second Arc/Tomorrow Project competition is hotting up.

In Arc 1.2, we asked you to write a story about how we’ll look, feel and behave in the near future. Will medical advances transform us; will environmental catastrophe narrow our options? Will our ideas of virtue and happiness shift to meet the future, or are these the constants by which we navigate our ever-changing world?

The winning story earns its writer £500 and will be published in Arc 1.3. Five runners-up will each win £200. The six finalists will also appear on our Tomorrow Project website.  

Since we’re after stories over 3000 words, this is pretty much the last call: if you haven’t begun your story yet, start now! Our address for submissions is:

http://arc.submittable.com/submit

The standard of entries so far is quite as high as those we recieved for our first competition, and if you haven’t read our runners-up yet, you’re missing a treat.

Visit http://uk.tomorrow-projects.com/arc-1-1-competition/ to read…

18% Happier, by Adrian Ellis, whose protagonist books a session with “The Future On-line Therapy Avatar” – and learns more about himself, his girlfriend, and his disgust with technology than he bargained for.

In A Private Party by Peter Dennis, the lingering online profiles of the dearly departed manifest themselves as artificially intelligent personas, and Nikol faces his worst nightmare: a rogue Sponge.

A. J. Ponder’s love-struck hero, Piri, sets out to accomplish the impossible – killing himself – in Dying for the Record.

In Tom Chatfield’s Before They Were Killed, a lonely woman who is not quite human paints a picture of a world where two races, the dogmatic Faction and the rationalist Guardians, fight against one another for survival. Her job is to guard history, but with a mind bent toward poetry and whimsy, she questions why she should protect the secrets of the past that have stolen her future.

And in Dave Darby’s Inherent Vice, an American tourist braves the dangerous trip to Madagascar in search of the most precious and contentious religious artefact of all – a strip of celluloid film.