"I try, but six years' worth of burnings? You can't convince yourself anymore. We clear an opening for the flag among the ashes and secure it: a looming symbol. I close my eyes and I escape to the past. To you. We used to go to those buildings when they held pieces of an even further past. Art museums, right? Remember the paintings? The war paintings on our field trips? The aftermath of destruction with a singular soldier standing? I like to think I am a soldier: Surviving something each time. That's why I am still here. I win my life every day." -- Excerpt from the original short story, "Inside, Outside, Enemy," by Keira Krishnaiah, Westridge School for Girls, finalist for The Tomorrow Prize
The Omega Sci-Fi Project, now in its tenth year serving students in Los Angeles County schools as part of Pasadena’s nonprofit Light Bringer Project, explores and illuminates the unknown through the work of teen student writers. This year, 133 students from 18 different schools participated.
Patricia Hurley, Managing Director for Light Bringer Project, says that this program, “is so relevant to this moment we find ourselves in right now, in the midst of fires taking over our living spaces and the directions this conversation can lead. The next generation most assuredly has a lot to say about their stakes in and their hopes for the future.”
The contest program offers a tiered flight of prizes that include both cash and publication in two categories. The Tomorrow Prize encourages young writers to use sci-fi to, “…explore the diverse issues humanity wrestles with, spark creative solutions, and unite the worlds of art and science.”
The first-place winner’s essay will be published in L.A. Parent Magazine. The Green Feather Award, co-presented by Nature Nexus Institute, calls for environmental themes exploring solutions to climate change and related eco-crises, with the winning essay to be published online by the Institute. Both categories award honorable mentions, and that number varies each year according to merit.
The Light Bringer Project also offers free, interactive science fiction creative writing and editing workshops to LA County high schools, both virtually and live. Sci-fi writing competitions for adult writers, The Roswell Award and New Suns Climate Fiction Award, are currently on hiatus as the Project seeks needed funding.
The Omega Sci-Fi Project awards ceremony will take place Saturday, May 17 at Pasadena’s Vroman’s Bookstore from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Actors Isabella Gomez and Rico E. Anderson will read selections from the winning stories and present the awards.
Isabelle Kellett who attends Notre Dame Academy has been announced as the winner of the 2025 Green Feather Award for her story “Santa Catalina.”
Finalists for 2025’s Tomorrow Prize are: Eddy Ju, University Preparatory Value High School, for his story “Verdant”; Charlotte Lumpkin, John Muir High School, Early College Magnet, for her story “Too Good To Be True”; Andrew Sweet, Marshall Fundamental Secondary School, for his story “Thread of Red”; Keira Krishnaiah, Westridge School for Girls, for her story “Inside, Outside, Enemy”; and Liam Duk-Stolting, Culver City High School, “The Basilisk.”
The winners will be announced at Vroman’s next month.
Sci-fi falls under the umbrella of speculative fiction. While sci-fi focuses on biology, chemistry, technology and physics, speculative fiction is broader, pausing to question and probe the unknown in more diverse ways. Fantasy, another subgenre, imagines the impossible, while other types of writing in this vein ostensibly address potentialities.
The roots of the genre run deep. For example, the 2nd century CE comedic satirist Lucian of Samosata wrote of a Roger Corman-esque world where the People of the Moon battle People of the Sun over colonization of the Morning Star, made all the ookier and kookier by an army of giant space spiders.
And let’s not forget the 9th century CE oldest-known Japanese monogatari (folk narrative), “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” where the lunar princess Kaguya-hime is sent to earth during a star-war for her own safety. An elderly, childless bamboo-cutter discovers her as a tiny, glowing infant snuggled inside inside a bamboo shoot, and he and his wife tenderly nurture her. She grows into a woman of incomparable beauty who rebuffs advances of nobles including those of the emperor, and is later wrapped in the feathers of forgetting, then retrieved by a moon-bound posse via flying saucer.
These ancient stories aren’t about the evils of technology, unlike the dystopian tack taken by modern sci-fi. Instead, these are subtler narratives of the fragmentation of the self and sensibility, the dawning of self-awareness, and the reckoning of personality. This being the case, the entire category of speculative fiction seems a perfect fit for that mysterious, turbocharged passage called adolescence.
We caught up with Valentina Gomez, Light Bringer Project’s Literary Arts Coordinator, who says, “As part of the creative process, we encourage our students to think deeply about the narratives that they are consuming. This is essential to informing and shaping their writing. We encourage kids to write about what’s important, and a lot of the stories have political undertones. Some kids do narrative around belonging, identity, and not feeling seen and heard. And of course this season, we got a lot of stories about the devastation of Los Angeles.”
In some classroom settings, students may receive extra credit for attending a free, daylong sci-fi workshop. But credits and honors are usually secondary when, as Gomez says, “Kids realize this is a cool thing.”
Bottom line: kids benefit from actually knowing how to write. But fewer and fewer high schools have student-run newsvapors (non-print digital outlets), and many colleges no longer require an essay as a crucial part of the application process.
And kids’ vocabulary is shrinking. Voice of America (VOA) reported in January 2024 that young people’s English language proficiency is decreasing not just here, but worldwide, according to the EF English Proficiency Test established by the Switzerland-based private company, Education First.
We get it, it’s far faster and easier to power-text a stream of emoticons, acronyms and abbreviations than to write a page or more of content. And there are those times when “You up?” will suffice.
Very few of these young writers will grow up to be the next Octavia Butler, Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clark. But that’s hardly the point.
“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today, but the core of science fiction — its essence — has become crucial to our salvation, if we are to be saved at all.” — Isaac Asimov
The practice of writing anything meatier than a grocery list requires multiple valuable skills unrelated to literature, starting with critical thinking. Writing a report, essay, song, poem, play, screenplay, short story or novel, including the graphic novel, requires the articulation of ideas and organization of thoughts into a coherent form.
The ability to verbalize what’s in our heads with clarity comes in handy. It’s called “communication.” This ability makes it easier for others to understand us, and easier for everyone to find common ground.
The smaller our collective vocabulary becomes, the smaller and more limited our thoughts and ideas become, with fewer points of contact, and the smaller and more divided our world, no longer brave or new, may become as well. In this way, The Omega Sci-Fi Project is a welcome bulwark against the growing trend toward the petty, insular and xenophobic that diminishes us all.
