Hack the Future: PHDays Holds Cyberpunk Contest Again

“These stories turned out to be better than I expected. I read them with pleasure. ”

With these words, Cyberpunk's father Bruce Sterling described the works of the finalists of our first “Hacked Future” contest, the results of which were announced at the Positive Hack Days V international conference in May 2015.

And this year, in honor of the upcoming PHDays VI, we again invite everyone to the contest of cyberpunk stories!

Background

This project began in 2014, when at the PHDays IV forum, the creators of the cult radio program Model for Assembly read the stories of Bruce Sterling and Mercy Shelley in a special audio and musical accompaniment.

Why cyberpunk? Yes, because the PHDays conference itself gathers “people of code”: hackers and security experts, IT businessmen and fighters for digital freedom. Much is said about the influence of these people on the modern world in the news, but these heroes are hardly reflected in the Russian literature of our days. So we decided to suppress the book images of women detectives.

The conference participants supported this initiative, and the next year the conference organizers decided to develop the “Cyberpunk Night”, providing an opportunity to get there and other science fiction writers. Thus was announced the first competition of science fiction stories "Hacked Future".

The competition received more than 200 stories. You can read about the results in our special report “ How We Revived Cyberpunk ”. And here we only recall that reading the winning stories gathered a full audience and left them very strong impressions, and the winner got a quadrocopter. Listen to the reading of the winning stories of last year here .

Let's repeat, expand and deepen! We are again waiting for your cyberpunk - one that Will Gibson and Neil Stevenson have never dreamed of!

The terms of participation

The Hacked Future contest accepts stories that are 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 unusual social structures. 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.

Any author can send one fantastic story of no more than 30 thousand characters to the “Hacked Future” contest . Only stories that were not previously published on paper (network publication is allowed) and did not participate in last year’s contest “Hacked Future” are accepted.

Send stories in .doc format (MS Word) tocyberpunk@ptsecurity.com . Application deadline is April 15, 2016.

Jury and Award

Bruce Sterling and the participants of the “Model for Assembly” project, as well as famous Russian science fiction writers, were again invited to the jury. The full list of the jury will be published later.

Awarding of the winners and reading of their stories will take place at the PHDays VI conference, on May 17, 2016 in Moscow , at the World Trade Center. Winners will receive an invitation to the event in advance: www.phdays.ru