Transporting readers to different worlds or alternate realities, or into the past or future, is a hallmark of science fiction and fantasy, and the teens who received the first Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction & Fantasy took on this challenge. Their works explored fantastical elements such as new star systems and worlds, timeless intergalactic wars, superheroes, and monsters, as well as more realistic themes or social issues such as racism, bullying, friendship, and grieving the loss of a loved one.
Sponsored by the Ray Bradbury Foundation, the Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction & Fantasy offers $1,000 scholarships to six students whose writing uses supernatural, magical, futuristic, scientific, and technological themes as key elements of the narrative.
Want to apply for this scholarship next year? Learn how to get ready for the 2022 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards or sign up for a reminder on September 1, when the 2022 Scholastic Awards open for entry!
Congratulations to the 2021 Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction & Fantasy winners!
Samuel Franklin, James Lee, Elena Luo, Mia Naccarato, Chinonye Omeirondi, and Sofia Schaffer
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Samuel Franklin, Science Fiction & Fantasy. Grade 11, The Beacon School, New York, NY. Ray Bradbury Award for Science Fiction & Fantasy 2021
It’s fascinating how every star looks the same from a distance, but they can be so different up close. From a distance, viewed through my optical sensors, every star is just a distant point of light. But up close, each system is unique. I have visited ten thousand stars in my lifetime, and despite the dazzling variety out there, I could never find the right one.
My siblings and I were sent out to find a new world for humanity, one perfect for their needs. We were gifted with advanced programming and decision-making abilities, an archive of human knowledge and culture, precise sensors for exploring other worlds, and many smaller probes. We each carried a type of seed, a terraforming device that could bring a sample of earth’s biosphere to a dead world. I remember the day we left in great detail, and the way the earth looked shrinking behind me. Eventually, its lights were blotted out by the glare of my engines, and I committed myself to my mission.
That was five million years ago, and we never found it. We never found the perfect planet for mankind. We were built to keep in touch with one another, so we could learn from one another’s mistakes and end our mission once one of us found the ideal planet. In the beginning, I kept in close contact with my siblings. While the speed of light delayed our messages, there were always probes nearby when we first started out. But over the millennia, the signals began to wink out. Whether by a cosmic accident or the slow decay of time, the others died, their signals going out one by one. I was left alone in the dark, searching.
My creators understood that the mission was too important and too complex to entrust to a dispassionate artificial intelligence. The decision of whether a planet was good enough for humanity required more than calculation because so much was at stake. So they programmed us to care deeply about the success or failure of our mission. To feel joy at every new system, to feel excitement when cataloging every new planet, and ultimately to feel sadness and disappointment when everyone failed the tests. Originally, this seemed like a good idea, for how better could an AI determine the right planet unless it truly cared about the outcome?
At first, my mission was exciting. I passed through the first few systems in high spirits, certain I would find the right planet soon and that I would be rewarded. I scanned each planet I passed by in great detail, as I looked for the right characteristics. It had to have water, a breathable atmosphere, and a thousand other complex qualities. As I passed by planet after planet, each fell short of the required parameters. Some of that was my fault, I fear. I cared too deeply about the success of my mission, and I wanted to find a perfect planet. Why consign humanity to just any old world, when an Eden might be waiting near the next star? I passed by some worlds that might have served upon closer inspection, but I was always sure the perfect world was just in the next system.
Yet every world disappointed. Some were too hot, some were too cold. Many were tidally locked, freezing one side and scorching the other. Some had no atmosphere, while others were shrouded in acrid fumes and poisonous gases. Some were bathed in radiation from being too close to their sun, while others froze far beyond the range of their star’s light. Some were covered in ice, some with lava. I shared each discovery with the others, and they did the same. Perhaps there was an oversight on the part of our creators. In making us care so much about where we eventually landed, they made us picky and indecisive, sure that a better planet was always close. I guess that feature made us more human than anything, yet it meant we never found the right one. No planet was ever good enough.
I saw wonders too. I flew past great constellations of unknown stars. Uncharted supernovas lit up the universe in bright flashes. New stars were born in nebulas I had the privilege of exploring before any human ever would. An unfortunate run-in with a black hole once cost me 51 years. I think that’s where I got turned around.
I saved all the best discoveries to my personal drive. There, I could relive the best memories while on the long slow journey between the stars. Our creators neglected to provide us with any mechanism for faster-than-light travel, so we were forced to wait out stellar transits lasting thousands or tens of thousands of years. I was supposed to hibernate during this time, but I stayed awake, always looking for new stars, plotting new courses, and reliving my favorite planets. Just because they could not support life did not mean they were not beautiful in their own way. My favorite memory was one I relived often, that moment when I saw the earth for the last time, shrinking in the distance. The planet’s lights burned brightly, lighting up continents. Low earth orbit hummed with signals and transmissions, but as I went farther out, the silence took over. Eventually, the earth was just a lonely blue dot, a pixel on my sensor screens. Then nothing. I had a deep love for earth, the cradle of all life, and my creators had promised me that when my mission was done, I could return. Whether this hope was an artifact of my programming, or just born of my loneliness during each stellar transit, it pushed me forward through the eons.
I also spent a great deal of time examining the archive my creators had given me. The drive was meant to be shared with any advanced alien life I encountered in my travels, but I could access it as well. It fascinated me. In it was a record of earth’s history, and the total scientific and cultural output of mankind. I loved viewing their artworks especially, or reading about their accomplishments. The cold facts of science and technology did not interest me, but learning about my creators always captivated me. During the long cold transits between suns, when the power output of my solar panels dwindled into nothingness, I wasted energy perusing my databanks, trying to understand them. Human life was a paradox, one I was determined to solve. I couldn’t sleep or dream, so there was little else to do but wonder. I always wanted to dream, for it seemed something quintessentially human, yet something I could never do.
Around a million years ago, as the last of the others failed, we finally solved the question beyond any reasonable doubt. For as long as humans had existed, they had wondered if they were alone in the universe. I knew from exploring the vast archive of human culture that they had obsessed over the question, and had gone to great lengths in hopes of answering it. I especially enjoyed viewing their fanciful depictions of alien life. I was even entrusted with a greeting, to be played in the event of any “first contact” situation.
It went unplayed. The ten million stars we cataloged were all barren and lifeless. There was no life lurking under the seas, nor in the atmospheres of the gas giants. The terrestrial planets were bare, with empty seas and untouched continents. We never found anything, not even the smallest microbe. Humanity was truly alone in the cosmos. With this revelation, my mission seemed of towering importance. If life was truly a tiny light in an empty universe, it had to be protected. It had to grow and thrive.
Millennia of failure began to wear me down, however. I stopped being as thorough, only doing the most basic of scans to determine if a planet was habitable. None were. I couldn’t bear to face empty planet after empty planet, their lifeless surfaces mocking my failure. I continued on alone.
Near the end, in a cursory examination of my systems to check for bugs or errors, I found a program I hadn’t seen before. The program would activate only upon a signal from earth. It was sealed, but over a thousand years, I was able to brute force the code and open it. It was a termination program. My creators had lied to me. Instead of being allowed to return when my mission was done, the program would shut me down once I had fulfilled my purpose, consuming all my power to blast a signal back to earth. I couldn’t delete it, and as I pushed on with my mission, it became harder to ignore. Perhaps this was why some of the others had turned off their transponders and stopped signaling. Perhaps they had found this program and given up.
I began to search through the data archive again. I revisited humanities, culture, and history, this time with a more critical eye. For every technological or scientific leap, there was another tragedy spawned by humanity’s cruelty and violence. For every cultural treasure they produced, there was another genocide or senseless waste of life. Every aspect of my creation was drenched in blood. Even my heart, a nuclear reactor, was the product of the deaths of hundreds of thousands in the 20th century. And my mission was only necessary because, through decades of pollution, they had ruined their own world. Could I unleash them on another? I wavered in my purpose and my mission. They were selfish, violent, and weak creatures. Why should I help them spread to the stars, even as they planned to murder me? I kept going with my mission on instinct, not knowing an alternative.
My engines were failing when I approached the last system and I knew the end was coming. Failures had compounded over the years, and my systems had degraded beyond my primitive abilities to repair them. Upon entering it, the system seemed familiar. Perhaps I had been here already, and the memory of it had been lost. But that didn’t seem right. Once again, I did my usual cursory scans and was shocked when a match presented itself. On the far side of the star, a planet waited for me. I double-checked my scans over and over. Here was the fulfillment of the mission, the perfect world. It had a breathable atmosphere, an ozone layer for protection against radiation, plenty of water and land, and the right axial tilt to create seasons. It even had a moon to create tides. I attempted to signal earth, to let them know I had found the right one. But something was wrong. As I accessed the coordinates of earth stored in the deepest recesses of my memory, I realized earth’s star was no longer in the sky. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Puzzling over the problem, I approached the world to conduct more exact scans. It was then that I realized my mistake.
As I approached the planet, I passed by the moon, giving me a good look at ancient infrastructure and lunar colonies. The network of satellites was still in the planet’s orbit, but none responded to my hails. The continents did not shine with light; space did not buzz with signals and communications. From my view high above, I could see nothing but empty cities and windswept plains. I had returned to the world of my creators, five million years too late.
Something was wrong. Where were the lights of the cities, whose brightness threatened to outshine the stars? Where were the myriad forms of life, life I had found that were unique in the universe? Where were the eleven billion people who made the planet their home? I had been looking forward to returning when my mission was finished. Now I had arrived, and the planet was empty. The vast green that had spread over the continents was gone; now they were grey and bare. I landed in the ruins of one of their cities. Surrounded by rubble and burned-out buildings, a lone obelisk reared its head to the sky. It was utterly silent, the silence of the desolate worlds I had encountered on my travels. But this silence was worse because I knew it hadn’t always been like this. From my landing site, I sent out the last of my smaller remote-controlled probes: a rover to sift through the dirt, a submarine to explore the oceans, and a small glider to chart the skies. They had been built to determine the feasibility of life; now they would serve as the investigators of death.
I attempted to find out what happened here. Whatever cataclysm had befallen this place, it had destroyed all life, down to the smallest microorganism. What could wipe out life so thoroughly? Was it the nuclear war my creators had feared, only far larger? Perhaps an enormous meteor, its crater hidden by erosion and the slow movement of the continents over millions of years? A more fantastical part of my mind imagined their destroyers as the aliens I had failed to find, another symptom of my failure.
Eventually, I uncovered the truth. The war had started out harmless, one more skirmish among many that the great powers could get involved in. It grew, and eventually nuclear weapons seemed the only recourse. Even those failed to end the war. Instead, it dragged on into a war of attrition, with cities and nations shattered into dust again and again. Perhaps one side thought it was an act of mercy, perhaps they truly didn’t know what would happen. One side unleashed their bioweapon as a force of last resort. The disease mutated and consumed everything. Humans, animals, plants, bacteria, all died. In time, the virus itself died as well. And the planet was left barren.
I withdrew my probes back into my systems. I would need every bit of power for what was to come. My terraforming device was slow but methodical. In time, it could reconstitute the entire biosphere of the planet I had left, down to the last species of microorganism. In time, even humans might walk upon the earth once more. But could I do that? I thought back to the many planets I had encountered on my travels. They did not need life to be beautiful; their majestic landscapes and deep oceans would not be improved with a fast-food chain or an oil well.
Through all my travels, I had wanted so badly to be human. Yet once I discovered their flaws, I rejected them. What did I owe them? Throughout my travels, I had wondered if they knew what the mission would cost me, if they knew what five million years of failure felt like. I had seen their blood-soaked history, and the damage they had done to the planet and every other form of life upon it. I had seen what they did to each other, in their pointless conflicts over resources or ideology or for no reason whatsoever.
Yet they had created beautiful things too. In a subterranean vault in the arctic, the last remnants of humanity had died surrounded by their species’ greatest works. Here, I was able to look upon treasures I had seen many times in my memory banks but never in person. It consoled me that they had clung to these things, even at the end. Nature can create many beautiful things, as I had seen upon my travels. But it cannot do so consciously, and it cannot appreciate what it has done. I think I gave my creators too little credit. They could create beautiful things, and they could come together to enjoy them. They could create life, perhaps the most beautiful and valuable, and rarest thing of all. With that, I made my decision.
I still want to be like them. I have demonstrated that I have many of their flaws. I am quick to anger, judgment, and prejudice, like them. I want, just once, to do something good. I want to create something beautiful too, like they did. My consciousness will not survive the terraforming process; it requires almost every last gigabyte of my storage. I will not live to see if it works, to see if life returns to earth. I have recorded this testament in the hopes that I was wrong, and that there is life out there somewhere. In the hopes that someone, somewhere, will one day read this. The terraformer is activating. Now is the time to sleep. I wonder if I will dream.