Creations
Hundreds of winners have had successful writing careers following their win and publication in the anthology, and to date has launched the careers of 12 New York Times bestsellers.
Hollywood, CA (PRWEB) August 19, 2014
William Mitchell, a winner in the 2012 Writers of the Future Contest and published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 28, has taken another step in his career as a professional writer. After seeing his winning story, "Contact Authority" published in the annual anthology—and so beating out several thousand other contestants—Mitchell soon had an agent and went to work on his first published novel.
Mitchell's first novel, "Creations," is now being published by John Hunt Publishing. The story is a near-future hard SF novel involving space exploration, lunar colonization and self-replicating machines. This is certainly Mitchell's forte, being a rocket scientist by day.
William was recently interviewed about the novel and stated, "The inspiration for this novel was a NASA study carried out way back in 1980, looking into the feasibility of building self-replicating machines. Even the idea sounds like science fiction, but they concluded that it was possible, and even came up with a concept for a self-replicating lunar factory, designed to autonomously grow and copy itself until it covered the entire surface of the moon. As soon as I heard about the idea my first thought was 'What if you built it to learn from experience, and improve its own design every time it copied itself? What would it eventually turn into?' The idea seemed too cool to leave alone, though in 'Creations' the results are anything but cool for the people involved -- let's just say it gets messy. But the fact that this is something NASA have seriously considered gave a lot of technical plausibility to the idea, and my own background in aerospace research helped carry that plausibility through to the rest of the story. And we see the whole thing through the eyes of Max Lowrie, the man whose work made it possible, but who was coerced into taking part and then has to deal with the consequences of these machines getting out of control."
Mitchell has short stories published, including "The Book of Dark Wisdom,", "Horrors Beyond," "Midnight Street," "Something Wicked," and a SF piece to Canadian Magazine, "Neo-Opsis".
Now in its 31st year, the Writers of the Future Contest began in 1983 and attracts entries worldwide in science fiction and fantasy. Twelve quarterly winners receive prize monies and, along with selected finalists, are published in an annual anthology, L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future (Galaxy Press). The book is sold in bookstores and at Amazon.com and gives the winners the exposure that they need.
Inspired by multiple New York Times best-selling author L. Ron Hubbard, the merit-based Writers of the Future Contest was initiated by him to discover and encourage talented beginning writers of science fiction and fantasy, and thus launch careers.
The idea has proved very successful. Hundreds of winners have had successful writing careers following their win and publication in the anthology, and to date has launched the careers of 12 New York Times bestsellers including: Jo Beverley, Tobias S. Buckell, Nancy Farmer, Eric Flint, Karen Joy Fowler, Tim Myers, Patrick Rothfuss, Lisa Smedmen, Dean Wesley Smith, Elizabeth Wein, Sean Williams, and Dave Wolverton aka David Farland.
Prospective writers should visit http://www.writersofthefuture.com for more information on how to enter the contest.