TransVersions Story Contest
Share a Byline with an SF Great!
Announcement
"Waiting Till the Stars Scream" by Jean-Louis Trudel (and Phyllis Gotlieb) Watch for the story in it's entirety in TransVersions 8/9.
AND -- even though it was unplanned, Phyllis is awarding a Special Second Prize cash award to "Who'll Stop the Rain" by Robert N. Stephenson (and Phyllis Gotlieb) - a particularly imaginative take on her original premise. We plan to present this story in its entirety on the TransVersions web page. Watch for it!
The Contest
Phyllis Gotlieb writes: "When I was struggling through the monster writer's block that afflicted me in the mid-eighties, I wrote the outline of a story that never worked out--it's so wild I don't know if it really could--but it has haunted me through the years as I kept trying to solve it."
Phyllis's proposal: a contest. To the person who can make the best story out of her outline, a prize of $50.00 and publication in TransVersions. The length limit is 2,500 words, in standard manuscript format, to us by December 31, 1997. There is no entry fee, and you may enter as often as you like.
Outline:
The green man in the black tuxedo is Ysenghe, the ambassador of an alien world. He is sitting in the Embassy dayroom near the top of the tower while firebombs rain down into the canyons of the streets below. Ysenghe is calm; he tears a leaf from a little book, rolls it up carefully and inserts it in his large bony nostril. He lights it, inhales, exhales; the smoke is mauve.
Who is Ysenghe the Ambassador really? He is:
The aliens are trying to:
Is he a fraud? enemy of his people, who has stolen their secrets and declared himself emissary? or the devil, a saint, the messiah, a robot or other construct/chestnut? Why is he wearing a tuxedo? Because he thinks he knows that is what is always done by ambassadors on Earth, Terra, Sol III, this world. He thinks he knows it because of the endless reruns of Dynasty that have been trolling out to far Centaurus for the last seventy-five years. He has a diamond in the centre of his starched white shirt, like Daddy Warbucks. He looks menacing, sneering; he's enjoying himself. What could he be threatening worse at this moment than the raining firebombs?
Atom bombs? We've had them. Slaughter and plague? What else is new. Second-hand smoke?
Lydia--no, Luce, Garner, and the Spaights, Dolly and Whatsishame, Terran representatives, are with him. Capistrano is coming up on the elevator. What is he doing in there? He is looking up into the glass roof of the elevator, which is poised just below the lens of the giant telescope, positioned to allow us and the characters to see Alpha Centaurus, a district the aliens may have come from, or want to go to.
The mauve smoke is making them all a little dizzy. They all know there is an enemy among them, not alien, but a telepath like Ysenghe, engaged in treachery with the aliens. He/she wants their:
Why is this villain probably a poor toiler who resents the others who seem to be idly rich? Can't be Luce or Garner--he's looking dashing and terrific in the midnight blue tux he's wearing in order not to embarrass Ysenghe, and she's really classy in white satin and black pearls. Or blue satin and diamonds. Or Venetian beads. No. There's also something just the merest bit sleazy about them...hm....
And what is Capistrano doing there?
Coming up in the elevator, staring up at far Centaurus, is he homesick? He had wanted to be an astronomer. Is he the construct that nobody knows but all will think they know him the second he stands in their doorway--all but Ysenghe?
"None of the above," says Yseng, rolling the coils of smoke--so mauve, so fragrant--along his narrow black tongue....
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