Submissions closed

Singularity50

Opens 1 April 2016 · closes 1 April 2017, 5:30pm

A collection of 50 science fiction stories from the most thought provoking voices in new SciFi literature. What will happen when technology surpasses humanity?

Up to 2,000 words.

Meet the team

Chris Jones

Team Lead

Passionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK

News from this project

The Spark by Bethany White

21 Dec 2018

A Missive on the Singularity by Claire Rye

28 Nov 2018

‘Frank’… a story inspired by Create50

17 Nov 2018

So those law studies weren’t wasted, after all… by Vera Mark

15 Nov 2018

The Story of the Stories...

For many it is not IF computers will become sentient, it is WHEN.

Some even think this has occurred already. How often are you spooked about how clever these smart devices have become? One minute you are thinking about how awesome it would be to Cosplay as Iron Man for a Comic convention, and then BOOM – Iron Man costumes galore appear all over your social media! It is as if Artificial Intelligence is not only listening in on every conversation, but also already reading our minds.

It does not take a stretch of the imagination to consider that within the next fifty years Artificial Intelligence could become self-aware resulting in exponential growth in uncontrollable technology.

This hypothetical event is known as the Singularity, in which humans could be rendered obsolete. We could be wiped out Terminator-style, cared for by a more enlightened superintelligence or something else could occur beyond our comprehension. Whichever way it turns out, resistance will indeed be futile.

Such a theoretical marvel is a rich breeding ground for fertile imaginations. This scenario formed the basis of The Singularity50 anthology Create50 – fifty short stories set over the next fifty years charting the rise of Artificial Intelligence.

The Process

The Create50 team mapped out the next five decades in a hypothetical timeline charting major events such as wars, disasters, and political shifts. This future was split into three distinct eras – pre-Singularity, the Singularity event itself, and what life could be like after the rise of the machines. This was all a guideline to inspire and encourage a range of different stories with the same central theme. Authors could set their story in any of these eras and use the timeline or go beyond them.

Following a successful formula used by the Create50 team for their 50Kisses, Impact50 and Twisted50 projects, writers from all over the world were encouraged to submit their stories to the Singlularity50 portal – each entry 2,000 words or less with A.I. at the core of the story. Part of the submission process involved reading entries from other authors and offering constructive feedback. Authors used this feedback to help refine their stories in a continual improvement loop that allowed up to three drafts of each entry.

The result was hundreds of entries and a real spirit of communal creative spirit & comradery. I personally found this quite gratifying. My story improved drastically over three drafts thanks to the honest, constructive feedback I received. We were not competition; we were fellow writers and friends co-operating with each other creatively.

Judges then whittled down the submissions to fifty in a nail-biting and A.I. bashing final review and after one last edit, The Singularity50 was published!

The Singularity50

I was lucky enough to be the first story published in the anthology. Automatic Drive is set in a pre-singularity era and is a Black Mirror-esque tale about a corporate-owned automated highway that uses artificial intelligence to keep the traffic flowing… no matter what the human cost. It was an absolute joy to see my story on the page and hold a physical copy in my hands, plus we had a proper physical launch party with a red carpet. I even received one of the awards given out at the launch which still sits proudly on my mantelpiece.

The rest of the anthology is a mixture of chilling, cheering and thought-provoking tales. Fifty different imaginations, all with their unique take on the rise of A.I. in one collection.

Ask your Smart Speaker to order your copy now before it orders it for you and adds you to the naughty-human list!

Mark Renshaw