Five years ago, in the twenty-fifth anthology of the Writers of the Future Contest, I had this to say about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Contest:
“Back in the 1930s and 1940s, before his thoughts turned first to Dianetics and then to Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard was one of the most versatile and prolific of the pulp-magazine storytellers. From his white-hot typewriter poured a prodigious stream of tales in just about every genre of fiction that those gaudy old magazines dealt in: westerns, mysteries, stories of the mysterious Orient, sea adventures, Arctic adventures, air adventures—you name it, and he wrote it. A tour through the long list of his story titles gives us the full flavor of that long-vanished era: ‘Cargo of Coffins,’ ‘The Trail of the Red Diamonds,’ ‘The Blow Torch Murder,’ ‘Hell’s Legionnaire,’ ‘The Baron of Coyote River,’ ‘The Bold Dare All,’ ‘Red Death Over China,’ ‘Yukon Madness,’ and on and on and on.
“But of all the many kinds of fiction that he wrote, science fiction and fantasy certainly were closest to L. Ron Hubbard’s heart. He did the westerns and the Yukon stories and the yellow-peril stuff to pay the rent, I'm pretty sure; but there can be no doubt that he wrote the science fiction and fantasy out of love.… Hubbard’s works of science fiction and fantasy long ago established themselves as classics of their kind, and have had no difficulty maintaining their continuing existence in print through decade after decade. The enduring popularity of such Hubbard novels as Fear, Final Blackout, Slaves of Sleep and Typewriter in the Sky, all of them fantasy or science fiction and all of them dating back to the early years of the 1940s, shows that he wrote them with something more in mind than his next paycheck. And when he briefly returned to professional writing after the World War II hiatus, at a time when nearly all the old pulp-magazine categories were extinct, it was primarily science fiction and fantasy that he wrote, stories like the Old Doc Methuselah series and the novel To the Stars, rather than more Oriental adventure tales or stories of life at sea.
“And so it was not surprising that late in his life, long after he had taken a break from his writing career to bring Scientology into the world, he would turn again to writing science fiction—with the huge novel Battlefield Earth and the gigantic multi-volume Mission Earth series, and, in 1983, would establish the Writers of the Future Contest to develop and encourage new talent in the field that he loved.”
And I said this, thirty years ago in the first of these volumes of annual award anthologies:
“We were all new writers once—even Sophocles, even Homer, even Jack Williamson. And I think we all must begin in the same way, those of us who are going to be writers. We start by being consumers of the product: in childhood we sit around the campfire, listening to the storyteller, caught in his spell, lost in the fables he spins, envying and admiring him for the magical skill with which he holds us. ‘I wonder how he does that,’ we think—concerned, even then, as much with technique, the tricks of the trade, as we are with the matter of the tales being told.…”
And ten years ago, paying tribute to L. Ron Hubbard, the Contest’s founder, in an essay I wrote for the twentieth annual anthology, I had this to say:
“Hubbard too had been a young, struggling writer once, in the pulp-magazine days of the 1930s. He loved science fiction and he wanted to ease the way for talented and deserving beginners who could bring new visions to the field. His idea was to call for stories from writers who had never published any science fiction—gifted writers standing at the threshold of their careers—and to assemble a group of top-ranking science fiction writers to serve as the judges who would select the best of those stories. The authors of the winning stories would receive significant cash prizes and a powerful publicity spotlight would be focused on them at an annual awards ceremony.”
And this is what I wrote twenty years ago, when I was helping Writers of the Future celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of its annual story contest:
“All of them [such early prizewinners as Karen Joy Fowler, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Robert Reed and Dave Wolverton] were amateurs ten years ago, when this Contest began. But you see their names regularly in print these days. Like you (and like Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and, yes, Robert Silverberg) they wanted very, very much to be published writers, and, because they had the talent, the will, and the perseverance, they made it happen.”
And, again, once more quoting my essay from the twentieth anniversary anthology: “The amateurs of today are the Hugo and Nebula winners of tomorrow. The Writers of the Future Contest is helping to bring that about.”
I quote myself again and again from these four anthologies, spanning two and a half decades, because I’ve been a part of this remarkable enterprise since the beginning—one of the founding judges, along with Theodore Sturgeon, Roger Zelazny, C.L. Moore, Jack Williamson, Stephen Goldin and Gregory Benford. Of that initial group, which included some of the brightest stars in the science fiction galaxy, very few are still alive, and only Gregory Benford is still an active judge. (I withdrew from judging myself, after nearly thirty years of service, a couple of years ago, but as an emeritus judge I remain a friend and supporter of the Contest.) Over the years, many another illustrious writer has been part of that board of judges—Frederik Pohl, Larry Niven, Tim Powers, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Hal Clement and more—and the luster of those names will tell you the importance of the position that the Writers of the Future Contest holds within the field of science fiction. Judgeship has even begun to carry over to the second generation, now, with Brian Herbert and Todd McCaffrey, the sons of Frank Herbert and Anne McCaffrey, replacing their progenitors on the panel.
But though the list of judges is an awesome one, what really counts is the list of winners. The very first anthology includes stories by such then-unknown writers as Karen Joy Fowler and David Zindell, both of whom have gone on to considerable writing careers. But if one pulls almost any volume of the series down from the shelves, one will find the early work of writers of the future who went on to become significant writers of the present: here are Ken Liu, Jay Lake and Myke Cole in the nineteenth volume alone, Stephen Baxter and Jamil Nasir in Volume Five, A.C. Crispin in Volume Ten. And so it has gone, year after year, with many of the early contestants coming back to become judges themselves.
The mechanics of the Contest haven’t changed in any significant way since the beginning. Entry is limited to writers who have never had a novel or a novella professionally published, and no more than three short stories. The manuscripts submitted are winnowed at the Contest’s Los Angeles headquarters by the Contest’s staff and coordinating director, and every three months a group of six or eight of them is submitted to the judges. (The authors’ names are removed from the manuscripts, to prevent the possibility that a judge might encounter the work of a friend or student.) Each of these quarterly Contests produces a first-place winner, who receives a cash award and a certificate of merit, and at the end of the year the judges are shown the manuscripts of all the quarterly winners, out of which they select a Grand Prize winner, who is given another and very generous cash grant. An annual awards ceremony brings the winners, the runners-up, and the judges together, and that year’s Contest is given permanence by the publication of the top stories in an annual paperback anthology, of which the present volume is the thirtieth. The complete set of anthologies forms quite an impressive shelf. It is not a big surprise, nor should it be, that so many of the winners and runners-up of these competitions should have gone on to major careers as science fiction writers or that their early work, as represented in these books, quite clearly displays the merits that would mark the fiction of their mature years ahead.
It’s been quite a trip, this thirty-year journey into creativity. I’m proud to have been associated with it from its inception in what is now the far-off decade of the 1980s, and, although I’m no longer an active participant in its proceedings, I hope to continue to observe from the sidelines as the work of discovering exciting new science-fictional talent goes on into the years ahead.