When the New Yorker's Book Bench blog reported last month on the H. G. Wells Short Story Contest, the Britain-based competition hadn't received a single entry. At least not for the one-thousand-pound main prize (about fifteen hundred dollars) open to writers twenty-five and younger—a second competition offering a quarter of that amount had received a number of submissions.
Book Bench blogger Eileen Reynolds illuminated a few reasons why young writers' story flow could have been so low—quirky rules that required entries to be handwritten ("because that is considered an important aspect of literacy") and asked writers to avoid employing elements of Wellsian science fiction, focusing rather on an alternative topic, "what life is like for ordinary people, working or retired." Or it could have been that potential entrants were simply unaware of the contest.
Whatever the reason, there are a few more days for writers in Britain and beyond to submit (anyone is eligible, per the entry form, though the target is university and secondary school students from Kent)—the deadline has been extended to August 15. Prize administrator Reg Turnill also opened the competition to science fiction and will accept typed entries, though, according to Kent News, handwritten entries will be given "extra marks."
The prizes will be awarded at the second annual H. G. Wells Festival in Folkestone, on the coast of Kent, taking place in September. The late author's great grandson, Dominic Wells, will present the awards.
A preview for one film adaptation of Wells's 1895 novella, The Time Machine, a work that "stimulated the imagination of mankind" and feature elements of both nineteenth-century ordinary life and the futuristic fantastical, is below.