Telescoping Time

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The James Webb telescope, six times more powerful than the Hubble, will be launched in the next few years. It brings with it the possibility of finding alien activity on planets in orbit around other stars. It is more likely than any previous human endeavour to lead us into contact with intelligent life from beyond the solar system.

In 2011, the second Earlyworks Press Science Fiction Challenge asked entrants to produce stories that would make a realistic contribution to the debate about how humans and extra-terrestrial species might prepare for contact and learn to co-operate rather than destroy each other through fear
or prejudice, by accident or design.

The stories in this book are our favourites from the resulting crop.

Featured authors:

R J Allison
Brindley Hallam Dennis
Rosemary Goodacre
Andrea Tang
Robert Leonard
Peter Rolls
Andrew Irvine
Chris Sanderson
K S Dearsley

This book is the result of the latest Earlyworks Press “Genre Challenge”. The challenges, run at the instigation of members of our forum members or of the wider circle of writers who work with us, are designed to investigate questions about different kinds of writing and they have never failed to produce a crop of interesting and enjoyable stories.

In 2006 The High Fantasy Challenge asked whether there was any mileage left in tales of elves and wizards. It turned out that there was, and to prove it, the best of the entries were published in The Sleepless Sands anthology.
The first Science Fiction Challenge, which ran in 2007, was a search for sci-fi writing “with real humans”, . The resulting anthology, The Road Unravelled has a remarkable set of characters grappling with the current issues in real-world science and technology.

In 2008, the Gender Genre Challenge sought evidence of differences in male and female writing styles. The top ten stories from this one were published on the website here Gender Genre Stories. By then, our poets were feeling left out so we also ran the Rhymers’ Competition, to see what contemporary writers would make of what some saw as an old fashioned way of writing poetry.

In 2009, the illustrations came first as our artists put forward a collection of paintings and photos designed to encourage new takes on old tales. The results was the Old Magic in a New Age anthology.

In 2010, the Memoir and Journalism Challenge was set to find the issues of the 20th century that were going to make history from a literary point of view. At the time of writing we are currently preparing an illustrated anthology of the best entries.

In 2011, we returned to science fiction when club member David Dennis marked the development of the James Webb telescope, and the resultant speculation about the search for alien intelligence, by setting a challenge he called Alien Co-Operation. Could we meet and communicate with races from other planets? What issues should we be thinking about to facilitate successful interplanetary relations?

The stories in Telescoping Time are our favourites from the entries offering answers – or further questions – to consider. Telescoping Time marks a turning point for us because it is the first of the competition anthologies to appear first in ebook form. The previous anthologies currently exist only on paper but ebook publication of a ‘best of’ set from previous competitions and challenges is planned for later this year.