The X Prize Is Now Backing Sci-Fi Like It Backs IRL Science

For years, the X Prize Foundation has funded competitions that ask participants to make sci-fi a reality: a device to extract water from thin air, like Star Trek's replicator; a tool to instantly diagnose disease, like the Star Trek tricorder; a crime alert network, inspired by Minority Report. But for its latest competition, Seat14C, the organization is putting the fiction first--by asking writers to envision what humanity will need in the future. Starting today, 22 new science fiction stories go live on the Seat14C website, courtesy of genre luminaries like Margaret Atwood and Charlie Jane Anders. Each story details the future from the perspective of a different passengers on a plane that traveled through a wormhole 20 years into the future. Other writers will then compete to tell the story of the passenger in seat 14C.