Hack the future: PHDays again holds a cyberpunk contest

“These stories were better than I expected. I read them with pleasure. ”

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

And this year, in honor of the upcoming PHDays VI, we again invite everyone to the competition 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 Stirling and Mercy Shelley in a special audio-musical accompaniment.

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

The conference participants supported this initiative, and the following year, the conference organizers decided to develop the “Cyberpunk Night”, providing an opportunity to get there and other fiction. Thus was announced the first contest of fantastic 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 with very strong impressions, and the winner received a quadcopter. Listen to reading the stories of the winners of last year here .

Let's repeat, expand and deepen! We are waiting for your cyberpunk again - the kind that Wil Gibson and Neil Stevenson have not yet dreamed of!

The terms of participation

The “Hacked Future” competition contains stories that are dedicated to the difficult life of a person in the world of global communications and digital surrogates that are rapidly advancing on us, total surveillance and invisible cyber war, artificial intelligence and unusual social structures. The genre and subject of stories can be wider than the classic cyberpunk, but 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” competition. Only stories not previously published on paper (online publication allowed) and not participating in last year's Hacked Future competition are accepted.

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

Jury and award

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

The winners will be awarded and their stories will be read at the PHDays VI conference on May 17, 2016 in Moscow , in the World Trade Center. Winners will receive an invitation to the event in advance: www.phdays.ru