The N3SP is sponsoring its first annual writing competitions for undergraduate students. The fiction contest asks students to address the following question:

“The year is 2035 and the United States is at war.  What does the world—and war—look like a dozen years from now? 

Send your responses attached to an e-mail to fiction.essay(at)n3sp.org no later than 5 p.m. Mountain Time on 1 March 2024, replacing (at) with an @ symbol. Additional formatting instructions are below and are different from those for the non-fiction essay contest which can be found here.

Eligibility:

All full-time undergraduate students at University of Colorado-Colorado Springs (UCCS), University of Colorado-Boulder (CU-Boulder), Colorado State University (CSU), University of Denver (DU), and the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) are eligible to participate.

Instructions:

Student fiction contributions must be no shorter than 1,500 words and no longer than 5,000 words. Authors are free to write in any genre, style, or form.

Students’ work will be submitted as a PDF in accordance with the following guidelines:

All text must be double-spaced in 12 point, Times New Roman font

The first page should list the following information:

• Author’s Full Name
• University and projected graduation year
• Campus e-mail and cell phone number

All subsequent pages must not include any personal information in the headers or footers. This will allow for an anonymous review with the first page redacted.

For a discussion of examples showing how fiction can be a “useful” tool to explore national security questions, see this brief talk by Peter W. Singer who, along with August Cole, leads a group appropriately titled Useful Fiction:

https://useful-fiction.com/why/

Singer and Cole’s work for the UK Ministry of Defense can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63fcc8648fa8f527fd7e23aa/Stories_From_Tomorrow_FINAL-web_issue.pdf

NOTE: Although Artificial Intelligence and similar algorithms can be the subject of the story when considering the future nature of war, any use of such tools such as ChatGPT to write the piece itself will result in immediate disqualification.

Prizes and Recognition:

The best work selected by a panel of judges will be awarded a first prize of $1,000. Second place will receive $750. Third place wins $500.

The top three entries will be published in the 2023-24 issue of Icarus, the Air Force Academy’s student literary journal. Exceptional stories beyond the three prize winners will also be considered for publication. The top three authors will also be invited to present and discuss their work at the N3SP Forum in April 2024.