Stories of the Quantum Universe micro-fiction competition: read our winning stories
photography by George Torode
Almost 100 submissions were submitted to our first micro-fiction competition; a contest to find the best bite-sized science fiction stories about quantum physics, organised in collaboration with the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
Stories were limited to just 500 words in length, and entrants were encouraged to think creatively about how ideas in quantum physics might be interpreted.
The winning story, The Observer’s Daughter by Georgina Pierson, explores the observer effect, which holds that observing or measuring a quantum system inevitably changes its state. By applying this idea to the experience of a young woman, Pierson sought to: ‘bring a human, relational lens to ideas that are often presented abstractly; to explore the observer not as a detached point, but as something embodied, relational, and inseparable from the system it encounters.’
The runners up are author, editor and publisher Michael Bailey, whose story SUPERPOSITION asks whether the idea of a coherent, singular self is a fiction in the context of quantum superposition, and sculptor Kate Robinson, whose story The Happy Prince’s Quantum of Uncertainty transports the multiverse concept to a folkloric setting to reflect on the multitudes within the natural world.
The annual Arthur C. Clarke Award is given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year.
Read the stories here