Positive Hack Days is hosting the Hacked Future Cyberpunk Story Contest

In 2014, an unusual event was held as part of the Positive Hack Days IV international forum on information security: the creators of the cult radio program Model for Assembly read Cyberpunk stories by Bruce Sterling and Mercy Shelley in special audio and music accompaniment.

The organizers of PHDays V decided to develop this project, giving young Russian science fiction writers the opportunity to get to their next Cyberpunk Night with their stories, which will bring together the main connoisseurs and heroes of the genre - hackers and security experts, IT businessmen and researchers, government representatives and digital fighters freedom.

To do this, we are announcing the Hacked Future science fiction contest, which is dedicated to the difficult life of a person in the rapidly approaching world of global communications and digital surrogates, total surveillance and invisible cyber warfare, artificial intelligence and new human abilities.

The winners of the competition will be awarded at the PHDays V conference, and their stories will be read by the “Assembly Model”. In addition, it is possible to publish the stories of the winners in a separate collection or as part of other collections of the Snowy Publishing House, which specializes in high-quality Russian fiction.

The terms of participation

Any author can send one fantastic story of no more than 30 thousand characters to the “Hacked Future” contest. Only stories previously not published on paper are accepted (online publication is permitted). The genre and theme of the stories can be wider than the classic cyberpunk, however, information technology should be a key element in the plot. Send stories in .doc format (MS Word) to cyberpunk@ptsecurity.com

Application deadline is from December 15, 2014 to April 15, 2015. Awarding the winners and reading their stories: Positive Hack Days V, May 26-27, Moscow, World Trade Center (winners will receive an invitation to the event in advance): www.phdays.ru

And who are the judges

In addition to the organizers of the PHDays forum, the jury of the competition invited well-known writers and publishers who are not alien to real science fiction. Among them:

• Gleb Gusakov, science fiction writer, head of the Snow Kom Publishing House,
• Alexey Andreev aka Mercy Shelley, IT journalist and cyberpunk writer,
• Vladislav Kopp, actor, permanent presenter of the program “Model for assembly”,
• Sergey Chekmaev, science fiction writer, editor of the project “Model for assembly”.

This is only part of our esteemed jury, the full list will be published later. In the meantime, we are waiting for your cyberpunk - one that Will Gibson and Neil Stevenson have never dreamed of!