The Funniest Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest Entries – Sci-Fi
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness”
The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest is a tongue-in-cheek contest held annually and is sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Entrants are invited “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels” – that is, deliberately bad
The contest was started in 1982 by Professor Scott E. Rice of the English Department at San Jose State University and is named for English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-quoted first line “It was a dark and stormy night”. This is the opening from the 1830 novel Paul Clifford
These are the entries (winners and dishonourable mentions) from the year 2002 to 2017 which I personally find funny or clever in some way.
On the third day the M’hree charged out of the xota’ani, the shrill fluting of wattambos and the clatter of ingpas on khotzi-hide vamscaps leading me to curse this primitive planet, the shuttle crew that had marooned me, and the skinflint Publisher who didn’t believe in Glossaries.
The Mushroom Men of Knarf were silently advancing on the unsuspecting earthlings, and their thin milky blood ran colder when they smelled spores from fungal toenail infections rising from many of the invaders’ feet, for to them it was a wondrous and shocking scent of kinship, homeland, and asexual reproduction.
“If you do not surrender to me by the stroke of midnight (Coordinated Universal Time) the Large Hadron Collider along with written and signed formal apology then I will reduce you, your planet, and your so-called ‘LHC’ to a fine saccharine flour; and then I will take that flour, mix it with milk and raisins and make scones which I will feed to ducks, and I’ll take their feathers and make a fantastic feather boa, and it will look stylish, so who’s laughing now?”
Timothy Hanson, Commander of the 43rd Space Regiment in the 52nd Battalion on board the USAOPAC (United Space Alliance Of Planets Attack Carrier) and second in command to Admiral L. R. Morris of the USAOP Space Command, awoke early for breakfast.
Racing through space at unimaginable speeds, Capt. Dimwell could only imagine how fast his spaceship was going.
“Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to remotely separated photons,” Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at the comms desk, “and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in eight seconds.”
The real problem with the “many universes” interpretation of quantum mechanics is that if it’s true, then somewhere, in some universe, anything you can possibly imagine has already happened, which means that somewhere, another version of me has already finished writing the rest of this science-fiction novel, so I’m not feeling real inspired to do it myself.
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