For our 2010 flash fiction competition, we asked for very short stories about worlds in which scientific theories we鈥檝e long since dismissed turned out to be true after all.
, best-selling and award-winning author of American Gods, Coraline, Sandman and many more comics and books, selected the winner and two runners-up from a shortlist of 10.
鈥淚 really enjoyed reading the shortlist, and was impressed by the way people folded huge stories, even things that felt like novels, into 350 words or less,鈥� says Gaiman, 鈥渏ust as I was impressed by the sense of wonder that the writers generated, and the clash between the way we see the world now and the ways we鈥檝e used to make sense of the world in the past.
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鈥淚 picked Atomic Dreams as the winner, mostly for its sense of compression: a story told in headlines, a world that we don鈥檛 live in that shows us our own world through a mirror. Of the runners-up, my favourites were Starfall (which managed to tell a huge end-of-everything story in personal terms) and Gaius Secundus ER (which managed to be both funny and accurate in its dead medicine, and was just the right length).
鈥淢y congratulations to the finalists. You all have a great alternate past ahead of you.鈥�
We鈥檒l be publishing the winner, two runners-up and seven shortlisted entries on CultureLab over the next couple of weeks.