[Newspoetry] Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2001 Results

[Mike Lehman]

Winner in the Science Fiction Category:

Kirk's mind raced as he quickly assessed his situation: the shields were
down, the warp drive and impulse engines were dead, life support was
failing fast, and the Enterprise was plummeting out of control toward
the surface of Epsilon VI and, as Scotty and Spock searched frantically
through the manuals trying to find a way to save them all, Kirk vowed,
as he stared at the solid blue image filling the main view screen, that
never again would he allow a Microsoft operating system to control his
ship.

Mike Rottmann 
Reno, Nevada
(775) 847-9205
RottmannMichel at cs.com

<http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/2001.htm>

History of the BLFC 

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has
sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary
competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to
the worst of all possible novels. The contest (hereafter referred to as
the BLFC) was the brainchild (or Rosemary's baby) of Professor Scott
Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line
"It was a dark and stormy night." Sentenced to write a seminar paper on
a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated
name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating
The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram, Rienzi, The Caxtons, The Coming
Race, and--not least--Paul Clifford, whose famous opener has been
plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle Snoopy.