“We, the science fiction writers, want to create a venue for serious science fiction on this site. We want to engage in exploration – space, time, space/time, speculative stories, alternate realities, what-ifs, mental journeys of all kinds, etc, etc, and etc.

We do not believe that the goal of writing is to commit precious, purple prose minutely describing events that happen to people who live in the suburbs. We do not believe that this sort of thing is particularly interesting to read, either.

We do not believe that all the Good Stuff has already been written. We suspect that if we try, we can write some Good Stuff ourselves.”

Thus The New h2g2 Science Fiction Writing Workshop throws down the gauntlet to h2g2 researchers. And Create would like to slap a few faces itself and therefore extends the challenge further to submit a suitable story, but a suitable story with certain parameters.

Below there are a number of pictures. All are blobs from Edited Guide entries on the topic of science. The rules of this challenge are to use these pictures to inspire a story. Ideally, each picture would be represented, but if the plot takes off and the characters take over and this is no longer possible, so be it. Still, the more pictures weaved in, the more kudos will be given.

Don’t forget to add the finished tale to the Workshop, and also tell us about it here. Feel free also to sign up to state a commitment to this challenge if you fancy doing it later in the month.

In addition, we have not let on which entries these blobs come from. Why not track them down? On each relevant entry there is a thread to which you can post to show that you have successfully found it. And if you manage to include a fact from any (or all) of these entries as well as using all of the pictures, well, a newly minted January Create badge will be yours.