Fiction Vignettes: Orbis Non Sufficit

Description

A fiction vignette is a short, evocative piece of writing that captures the essence of a moment, painting a picture with words. Often, they focus in particular on the feelings or memories that a scene invokes for a character. They are tight, focused exercises in lean and efficient language. 

For this competition, you will be writing a 250 to 500 word vignette inspired by the image above, Jetfreak-7’s “Orbis Non Sufficit” (Latin for ‘the world does not suffice’), which depicts three starships and three runabouts exploring the Dyson Sphere first discovered by the Enterprise-D in TNG: “Relics”. 

Here are some angles you could explore:

  • Imagine your own starship or squadron exploring the Dyson Sphere or a similar ancient megastructure.
  • Recount a character’s prior service on one of the ships in the image during a survey of the Dyson Sphere, capturing how being inside such a structure felt.
  • Have a character look back on historical documents related to the exploration on the Dyson Sphere. Do they make them feel envious of those that got to go there first? Excited for future exploration missions? Scared of the powers that would need to exist to create such a sphere?

Submission Instructions

Stories should be posted to the BFMS. The submission box should contain a link to the story and an artist’s statement of up to 250 words describing what you were hoping to accomplish and how the story you are submitting was inspired by the prompt and the image. Note: if the vignette you are submitting is part of a longer post, you should mark the vignette off in a block quote and indicate that as such in your submission. Nothing outside of the block quote will be considered for grading.

Entrants are encouraged to proofread their work thoroughly, as short genres of writing like this make typographical errors more noticeable.



Criteria

  • Submissions must contain a link to a BFMS story and an artist statement of up to 250 words, as described above.
  • Submissions must be between 250 and 500 words.
  • Submissions will be graded using the Bravo Fleet Fiction Rubic. The submission with the highest number of points will win. If two stories receive the same number of points and the judge cannot otherwise distinguish between them, the time of submission will be used to break ties.

Winners

Submissions

User ID Content Date Entry
Khim Samnang 2222

Author Statement: Someone once said that any civilization capable of building a Dyson shell doesn't need to. Just a trace of cosmic horror.

https://bravofleet.com/story/71779/

 2023-02-05 01:38:53
Andreus Kohl 2374

Because I'm still introducing most of the characters of the Olympic, my first inclination with any chapter is to find moments to dramatize parts of the characters' bios. As I considered what Draia's sensory experience of a Dyson Sphere might be, her pleasure at being in tight enclosed caves struck me as the part of her personality I wanted to spotlight. The first image that came to mind was Draia laying in the grass, struck by the uncanny valley of staring into a sky that was and wasn't a sky. In researching Dyson Spheres, I get the sense they're so big that a person couldn't... necessarily see anything wrong with the horizon, which is why I cheated it with Draia's feeling of something being off that she couldn't describe. The connections I drew about why she prefers enclosed spaces are perhaps more on-the-nose than I would like, but it came naturally through the writing process, and I hadn't considered it when I actually wrote the bio, so I had to keep it as part of her canon. There's a certain alien, reptilian, perspective to wanting to avoid big open natural spaces, especially for stories about space explorers, but desiring life in a cave could also be relatable and womb-like to some. I tried to play with the tension between it being a welcome and unwelcome sensation. I intensified the irony by her feeling safe while falling a great distance. https://bravofleet.com/story/71748

 2023-02-04 21:24:12
Evelyn Sommers 2446

Link: https://bravofleet.com/story/71742
ID: 2446

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Artistic Statement

The vignette has three themes within. The most obvious is the contrast between the technology of the Galilean telescope and a Dyson Sphere. Both are relics of the past, but both are also scientific wonders.

The second theme is abandonment. In the ST:NG, the Dyson Sphere is uninhabited. For whatever reason, the civilization that constructed it disappeared. For Charlotte, her father was MIA during the Dominion war. This fact is not mentioned in the piece as it’s not necessary. For his daughter, Commander James Fawkes is gone. Whether it was his choice or not, he abandoned her.

The final theme is the connection Charlotte has with her father. As much as she feels he is gone, her father is with her through the telescope. He is with her through the wonder they share for astronomy and space. The vignette references both through their rank; she is a Lieutenant, and he is a Commander. Their most significant connection is Starfleet, as Charlotte follows in her father’s footsteps.

2023-02-04 19:39:03

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