In Competition No. 3190 you were invited to submit the first paragraph of your least favourite type of novel.
Sci-fi was the most well represented genre by a long way, with many thinking along similar lines. Here’s a flavour from Joe Houlihan:
Not for the first time, Drod Vordant was struck by the ethereal beauty of the Butterfly Nebula. Even at 178.4 light years distance the clouds of silicate and poly-aromatic-hydrocarbon dust that formed its wings occupied three quadrants of the ship’s astrodeck…
In a smart, funny entry, hardboiled–hater Robert Schechter stood out (‘The phone rang on my rented desk like the bell on the neck of an epileptic cow…’), as did excellent contributions from Alan Millard, Barry Baldwin, Nick MacKinnon and George Simmers. The winners take £25 each.
Looking back, Pedro Garcia Cicuendez could still remember those childhood years when he could fly. His mother’s house had been full of strange things, sieves, charangos, puppets, skewbald guinea pigs and extravagantly branched cacti, for everything in the world was new in those days, before the ghost men came. He was too solid for flight now, though once in a while, when he jumped one of his boss’s fences, he had to recall the propriety of coming back down to earth. At least he was not as earthbound as his sister, who years ago had fixed herself in a corner of the town square and now shaded men and llamas with her spreading branches. The townsfolk, of course, were not so indecent as to tether some ill-educated mule to her. Yet the stumps of his wings still chafed, beneath his solemn work clothes. He read the letter again. Frank Upton
When the snow came, as the leaves had foretold, it fell at first as a scanty shower that shimmered and glimmered like the dust from an angel’s wings.
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