Here’s the story that came 2nd place in our WBWW competition. Empty Skies Over Tokyo written by Marissa Jeffrey from USS Victory, part of UFOP: Starbase 118.
This story got a lot of praise from one of our judges, Aimee the winner of this year’s First Person Fortnight competition.
The strengths of the story that spoke to me most, aside from the expected “good grammar/punctuation/understanding of storytelling”:
1) Great demonstration of “Show, don’t tell.” It’s probably the only story that didn’t do this to a fault. It was narrating but it was describing what the characters were doing and how they were interacting with their environment and thus communicating “this is good/exciting/something I’m proud of” to the reader.
2) A clear format made to show the intended style; well-chosen names of places and dates. Very striking in their military/future origin, but not over-explained.
3) It comes full circle and leaves this reader with a simple feeling of family identity and pride in one’s place in the world, but doesn’t get more complicated than that. Vocabulary is tight and story feels focused.
4) Mature and sophisticated world outlook and a writing style to match it.
I also liked the detail that the “ancestor” was from 2003. 🙂 That makes great sci-fi.
Here’s the story in full.
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Weeks after the end of WBWW, and the winner has been announced, I found this exciting gem in my email spam folder. My heart sank as I realised what had happened, this had been submitted by email but for some unknown reason was treated like spam. Usually I trust Gmail, as it usually does a decent job of distinguishing actual spam, but for some reason it hide this away from me. The story was submitted by Wes from OtherSpace. We’ve featured several articles by Wes about his MUSH.
