Science Fiction

The prompt for the contest asked only that entries have at least a tenuous connection to the Bulletin’s mission; some of those connections were pretty tenuous.

To my way of thinking, the final 10 stories I sent to Stan all seemed at least competent. But I wasn’t sure if they were good only in comparison to the many disorderly efforts at storytelling that my editorial helpers and I had dutifully read. I was, after all, sending them to Kim Stanley Robinson—who, The New Yorker has opined, is “generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers,” and whose work The Atlantic has called “the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing.” His books have been translated into 29 languages. He’s had an asteroid named after him, for god’s sake.

I was ready to apologize for wasting his time at any suggestion that our stories were wanting.