Write a sports- or gaming-related sci-fi story.
Let the competition begin! Well, it's already begun in a number of venues. In the US, the first NCAA College Football Playoff is about to culminate with the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish having risen to the top of the brackets. Unfortunately, my Texas Longhorns didn't make it all the way this year.
In international footbol (aka soccer), the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup matches will be held in the US this summer, including your favorite Premier League teams, like Real Madrid and Manchester City. Again, unfortunately, my favorite, the Tottenham Hotspurs, did not make the cut.
The annual college basketball tournament will be heating up around the time many of your theme stories are published. I don't follow that sport closely enough to have a favorite (lucky for them), but I do enjoy filling out the brackets and watching the games.
Last but not least, Sci-Fi Shorts is hosting an exciting competition of our own right now. Our first-ever SFS writing contest is open for registration, with judging to occur in February and March. Check it out by clicking the image below. It's going to be a blast!
About this prompt
For this theme prompt, we ask you to write an imaginative and evocative science fiction story about a sporting competition. It can be either a team sport like soccer/football or an individual competition like boxing or table tennis. The rules are completely up to you — they may be already familiar to us, or completely alien. The competitors can also be alien, or human, robotic, or anything else you can imagine.
Remember though, it's not enough just to describe a game where the underdog wins or something. We are looking for stories with a point. A message. A moral, perhaps. Make us think and feel something about your characters, however alien they may be. That's what great sci-fi is all about.
Rules
The rules for the theme prompt are as follows:
Entries should be submitted in the usual way using the Write for Us submissions link.
Mention the title of the prompt (Galactic Brackets) in the Notes field of the submissions form.
Submissions must be received by February 22 to qualify.
Entries must comply with all the usual SFS Guidelines.
Your work can be horror, romance, dystopian, alien, or whatever, as long as it’s Sci-Fi and addresses the prompt's theme.
Submit only one story for this prompt.
You may continue to submit stories to SFS that are outside the contest, and we encourage you to do so.
If you have more than one story that fits the theme, please submit your best one for the prompt and send us the others as non-theme entries. Also, if the editors feel your theme entry is good enough to publish but does not satisfy the theme requirements, we reserve the right to accept it as a non-theme submission.
After the prompt has ended and all the entries have been processed, we will list and link to the participating stories in a blog post. The editorial staff will choose one story for special mention as the Editors' Choice of the Month.
Exemplars
Everybody loves sports of some kind. The great sci-fi writers of the past certainly did. Here are a few examples of vintage stories about sports and gaming. Click the links to read a free online version of the stories.
A Small Case of Sunstroke (aka The Stroke of the Sun) — Arthur C. Clark, Galaxy Magazine, September 1958 I attended a soccer match in Edinburgh, Scotland earlier this year. At the half, I went to get a beer at the refreshment stand, but there was no beer on the menu. When I asked why, the kid behind the counter looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Because we fight when there's beer." Clark's story is about such passion at a future soccer match, and also the power of sunlight. "They play football for keeps in Perivia."
The Celebrated No-Hit Inning — Frederik Pohl, Fantastic Universe, September 1956 He was the best pitcher in baseball. The best hitter, too. No human could beat him. "Even for nickels, don’t bet against him, because he isn’t ever going to lose, not before 1999."
The 64-Square Madhouse -- Fritz Leiber, Worlds of If, May 1962 Now that computers are capable of beating any human chess grandmaster, this story is a bit dated, perhaps. But its multi-faceted views of a high-level chess tournament from multiple points of view (women, men, machines) are still interesting and thought-provoking. "Well, there's something you can't build into a machine—ego."
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So go ahead, compete! Set your imagination against itself in a friendly, or not-so-friendly, game of invention. Show us the winners, the losers, and the referees of the game, and make us care about them.
— The Editors
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