Winners Announced
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Seattle Worldcon 2025 Short Story Writing Contest!
- Youth category: “The Dream Terminal” by Michelle J. Diaz
- Adult category: “Follow for More: Captain Garvey Fights the Space Junk!” by Sarah Darbee
Prizes include a membership to Seattle Worldcon 2025 for the winners (and for the guardian of the Youth winner), publication on the Seattle Worldcon 2025 website (coming soon), and publication in a forthcoming anthology by Grim Oak Press.
Congratulations to the winners and finalists! Seattle Worldcon 2025 thanks all of the authors who submitted stories to the contest.
About the Contest
With short story submissions from all over the world, the Worldcon in Seattle 2025 Short Story Contest was fierce. The contest theme was: “Building Yesterday’s Future—For Everyone.” This theme was selected to invoke nostalgia for the hopeful science-fictional era of the early 1960s, when Seattle held its first (and until now, only) Worldcon, followed up by the Century 21 Exposition (a.k.a. 1962 World’s Fair), showing the world a vision of its technological future, complete with freshly built Monorail and Space Needle.
Stories were limited to 3,000–5,000 words for adult contestants, or 2,000–4,000 words for young adults (18 and under).
Finalists
Finalists for the Adult Category:
- “Crossovers” by Dave O’Neill
- “Follow For More: Captain Garvey Fights the Space Junk!” by Sarah Darbee
- “Into the Open” by Jela Schmidt
- “Lost and Found” by Lucie Lukačovičová
- “Prerequisites for the Creation of a Possible Predicted World” by Chisom Umeh
Finalists for the Youth Category:
- “1962: The Year the World Changed” by Elizabeth V. Schaffer
- “And Justice For All” by Sharada Puranam
- “The Dream Terminal” by Michelle J. Diaz