Contest Rules
More Guidance: What is a Protopia? (Things We Want and Don’t Want)
01
LENGTH AND CONTENT
We are seeking previously unpublished short stories of 500 - 6,000 words.
You may submit only one story to the contest, in one of the two prize categories.
02
PRIZE
$5,000 for each category. Winning stories will be published in In the Loop: Stories from the Future of People, Power, and Machines, an anthology to be published by MIT Press and edited by judging leads Gideon Lichfield and Ruthanna Emrys, alongside invited stories by professional science fiction authors.
Winners will be asked to sign contracts for the anthology; you do not give us any rights over your story simply by submitting.
03
LLM USE
Works that are written, either wholly or partially, by generative large language model (LLM) tools are not eligible. While your story may depict all sorts of innovative uses of AI tools, you may not include AI-generated text as part of your story – we are celebrating human creativity and vision, and their role in creating a better world.
We will ask participants to self-attest that all words in a story are human-generated, and will also exclude works that clearly include AI-generated components.
In turn, the contest organizers will not feed submissions into AI training, nor use LLMs to create any publication, promotion, or other documents related to the contest.
04
TIMELINE
Launch in March 2026. Submissions will be open May 1 - July 31, 2026. Prize announcements anticipated September 2026.