Saturday, June 25, 2011

Poetic "Martian Dreams" wins Kessler flash fiction contest

Earlier this year, the creative marketing folks over at the MyOuterSpace.com science fiction community held a flash fiction writing contest inspired by NASA’s 2008 Phoenix Mars Mission. Fittingly, the judge — and muse — for the contest was nonfiction writer, Brooklyn resident, and monobookstore tenant Andrew Kessler, whose new book, Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission (Pegasus, April 2011), details what it was like to work on the mission.

The winning contest entry, announced on June 22nd, was “Martian Dreams,” penned by a writer known as The-Reluctant-Author. In describing the piece, Kessler said:
“Only a true space geek could make the barren Martian wilderness seem so vibrant and inspiring. This story almost read like a poem. Space poetry is a much-underrepresented genre. Lo, ye sentences were like stanzas, you Bard of Mars. In fact, if you didn't know it was a story about Mars, you could almost be forgiven for thinking it was describing the harshness of the Colorado Plateau, or the plains of the Great Basin. And that’s one amazing truth about Mars and how it captures our imagination — its strange familiarity.”
After reading “Martian Dreams,” be sure to check out the second place entry — “Dust to Dust” by Vendetta Jones — and all of the other submissions!
   

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