Back in high school I was a very avid reader of the science fiction magazines, and in the fall of 1964 I came across this in the December issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction:
A contest with a hundred dollar cash prize!
I had dreams of becoming a professional writer in those days so I decided to try to enter the contest.
Now the discerning reader will perhaps wonder, if I had any thoughts of becoming a professional writer someday, why it should take a contest to get me revved up? If I were really serious about becoming a writer, why didn’t I just, you know, write? Write story after story and if they seemed any good, then try submitting them to a magazine. I mean, that’s how most pros got started, right?
I don’t have a good answer for that. Other than perhaps I knew even then that it was merely a wild-ass dream, and even I didn’t take it very seriously.
In any case, I didn’t have any ideas for a story involving a unicorn and a Univac, but I mentioned it to my classmate Mary Lou Bliss.
My memory is dim on exactly what happened next, but somehow between the two of us we cobbled something together. I think she started it off, then I added something, or vice versa, then she looked it over and made some changes, and I finally tweaked it, if one wants to call it that.
I’m not sure that it was really a “story” by anyone else’s definition of the term, but it did come in at under a thousand words. I remember that it never mentioned a Univac per se, only a generic computer, so I don’t think it really followed the letter of the the contest instructions.
Whatever.
In any case, I typed it up, and enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope per the instructions, I sent if off to the address given.
We didn’t have too long to wait as these things go. In the April, 1965 issue of the magazine, there was a list of the winners:
Clearly, we didn’t win.
Shortly afterwards, I found our story in the mail, returned in the self-addressed envelope as promised. It was accompanied by a form letter thanking us for our submission and though we did not win, we were assured that all the submissions were of a very high quality.
Yeah, right.
A few months later the top two winning stories appeared in the magazine.
On reading them, Mary Lou commented, somewhat sheepishly, “We got it completely wrong. We totally missed the point.”
I’ve never heard of the first place winner, Herb Lehrman, ever again as far as I can recollect, but the second place winner, Greg Benford, became a major writer in the field.
Meanwhile, I believe that the story that Mary Lou and I wrote has long since vanished without a trace. Should a copy of it ever surface again, rest assured, I will destroy it post haste.
If you wish to read the actual winning stories, they can be found in the archive of the June 1965 issue of F&SF.
