Machine of Death

The anthology calls for stories based on this episode of Dinosaur Comics, created by Ryan North.

Pay is $45, and the early deadline is March 31, 2007.

From their guideline page:

The premise of the anthology is covered in the book's introduction, above. Your mission, as a writer, is to come up with the best possible story that fits in the world described in the introduction. The only major difference between THAT world and THIS world is that people in THAT world can undergo a cheap and easy blood test to find out how they are going to die. So the stories that we're interested in are those that somehow explore that idea in an interesting or entertaining way.

This death-predicting machine is (at its mechanical heart) a modern version of the ancient Greek Oracle. It gives you a clue about what your fate will be, but it never tells you enough to really give you control of your life. You only have the illusion of control. So one kind of story that fits in this world is the kind of story that the Greeks loved -- a story about a person who learns his fate, who tries to escape it, but who ends up trapped by fate in the end anyway. There are a lot of clever ways to handle this kind of scenario in the modern world, but we also hope to get stories that push beyond this idea and explore other implications of the machine.

Do check out the entire page before submitting; they've included some guidelines as to what they are -- and, more importantly, aren't -- looking for.

Contests like this make good writing group challenges, in my opinion - they give everyone a spark of inspiration and a chance to finetune their technique, with a readymade deadline and an easy choice of first market to try. The current Escape Pod flash fiction has close to a dozen stories submitted by one of my online writing groups, and it's making watching the judging even more interesting.

The problem with anthology writing, on the other hand, is that a lot of people are going to end up stuck with unsellable stories. Just as pirate stories will be unsellable soon, after the advent of two anthologies and a theme issue in 2007. My personal prediction is that dragons will be the next pirates. Start on those stories now.