The 94-year-old said: “I wanted people to write the stories by hand as a condition of entry to address the low standard of literacy and handwriting these days.
“It’s an important art in itself and many of our most famous authors find that’s the best way to do creative writing.
“I also wanted the stories to reflect life in 2010 so they would interest readers in 2110, in the way that Wells’ stories do.
“My aim in offering the £1,000 prize was to get people to mimic what Wells did in the 1900s.”
Mr Turnill said last year’s HG Wells competition entries consisted mostly of sci-fi, so he wanted to be more specific in what this year’s should contain.
“Last year there were plenty of entries because the competition was open to writers of all ages and stories could include science fiction, depicting ghastly invasions of our everyday lives by all sorts of nameless horrors,” he said.
There’s no visible means of support and considering this hairstyle lasts through being captured by Imperial forces, imprisoned, ineptly rescued (sorry, it’s the truth) and almost being crushed by a garbage compactor, we’re forced to conclude she could have only kept it in place with super glue. Which I hear is not all that great for hair.
I was watching the original Transformers cartoon, and I decided the only robot who could be more of a jerk to Megatron than Starscream is Bender.
By going back and outlawing any events that would later prove paradoxical in the future, this theory gets rid of the uncomfortable idea that a time traveler could prevent his own existence. “In our version of time travel, paradoxical situations are censored,” Lloyd says.
But this dictum against paradoxical events causes possible but unlikely events to happen more frequently. “If you make a slight change in the initial conditions, the paradoxical situation won’t happen. That looks like a good thing, but what it means is that if you’re very near the paradoxical condition, then slight differences will be extremely amplified,” says Charles Bennett of IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.
For instance, a bullet-maker would be inordinately more likely to produce a defective bullet if that very bullet was going to be used later to kill a time traveler’s grandfather, or the gun would misfire, or “some little quantum fluctuation has to whisk the bullet away at the last moment,” Lloyd says. In this version of time travel, the grandfather, he says, is “a tough guy to kill.”
