When Daedalus of Greek mythology first stretched his makeshift wings to soar toward the heavens, humanity was able to tell a story. It was a story of striving for something new, something greater than the fulfillment of a single life.
It was the story of reaching for the heavens, for what was above.
For thousands of years, the tradition of storytelling has breached the canopy of the sky on wings of imagination, despite the fear of repeating Icarus’ fiery crash.…
To tell a story is to embrace our spirit, our essence, our heart and our soul—it is to speak the language of dreams. For eons, that tradition went uninterrupted, spoken from generation to generation and painted on every possible surface. Then came canvas and the printed page, and with them, a new era of storytelling. The speed of our achievement began to match the pace of our dreams. The industrial revolution, which so shrank our world, also changed the nature of the stories we told. Daring adventurers stretched the limits of science and art, pursuing the dreams of the Creative, and humanity flew.
A single story could be shared with millions. Storytellers like Dickens, Verne, and Wells paved the way for Steinbeck, Mann, and Hubbard to lay a literary foundation for the Golden Age of Storytelling—a road map to the future. McCaffrey, Bradbury, Heinlein, Herbert, and a wave of far-seeing, almost prophetic, writers of the human condition created a new world for the modern novelist such as Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Larry Niven, and Orson Scott Card to create in. In turn, these storytellers have found the bright torch of creation to be one that can be passed along to the next generation of great creators.
But a curious thing has happened … for a score of centuries, humanity strove to catch up to the impossible dream of Daedalus’ flight, and in the last eighty-five years, we caught up to the future told in the stories of those who wrote such far-fetched dreams. The current judges and winners of Writers of the Future live in a world where jet packs are real. Google is testing the self-driving car. Sony has created robots that look like humans.…
As the torch of imagination is shared with this newest group of Writers and Illustrators of the Future winners, we can only imagine what wonders they will discover as we come full circle into the New Golden Age.