TELEPORT US! - Rewarding Our Top Stories!

The excitement over LitReactor’s sci-fi writing challenge, Teleport Us!, has been building for months. More than a hundred writers showed up to the game and gave us their best science fiction. Each story received feedback and reviews, which we have tirelessly poured over to bring you the best of the best.

Last week we rewarded the amazing reviewers—the people who gave hours of their valuable time to help fellow writers with fantastic feedback and support. 

And now it’s time to reward the authors for their writing. These top-rated stories will be receiving a story critique from some very talented people.

We want to give a special thanks to our reviewers for taking time to help out our aspiring writers.

Here are the winners (in no particular order):

• Alien Chemistry by thessilian - Adam Christopher
• Servants of the Last Man by TomMartinArt - Joseph Nassise
• Hiram Wakes by Sarah Cannon - Dana Fredsti
• The Human Argument by C Patrick Neagle - Chuck Wendig
• Of Flesh and Steel by Aaron Martin - John Joseph Adams
• Higher Minds by Phillip McCollum - Dana Fredsti
• Regulated Acts of Violence by Laura Keating - Joseph Nassise
• Ms. Ishmael's Box  by 12thkey - Adam Christopher
• The Last Dance by GG Silverman - Dana Fredsti
• The Gorund by ender.che.13 - Alastair Reynolds
• Gizmo by lspieller - Kat Howard
• Call Me Tim by klahol - Lynne M Thomas
• Bug's Day at the Office by Jason Preu - Dana Fredsti
• Implant by ArlaneEnalra - Brenda Cooper
• Gravidism by Mess_Jess - Alastair Reynolds
• A Song for my Brother by Maria Stanislav - Joseph Nassise
• Our Masters by Fhhakansson - E. C. Myers
• Company by irennie - Lynne M Thomas
• The Sea Came by Linda - Kat Howard
• A Way Out by JC Piech - Chuck Wendig
• Xenophobe by Liam Hogan - Kat Howard
• Big Bang, Inc. by Sound - John Joseph Adams
• The Memory Remains by Adam Jenkins - Dana Fredsti
• Scrap. by Ben Sharp - Alastair Reynolds
• The iDo-30 Pact  by Nathalie - Adam Christopher
• Affirmnation by Whammer - John Joseph Adams
• Corporate Person by scifiwriterguy - Brenda Cooper
• How to Lose Your Heart, Escape a Dying Planet, and Tell a Joke on Mars by Tim Needles - Alastair Reynolds
• Sustenance by Jerry L Mercer - Chuck Wendig
• The Space Bar by dufrescm - E. C. Myers
• Anomaly by Ethan Cooper - Alastair Reynolds

Congratulations to all our participants. Your reader will provide his or her feedback in the coming weeks. Expect to see feedback as a reply right on the actual story pages. Once all the feedback is in, we'll report back and link to all the results and see what our instructors had to say about these stories!

We hope everyone had fun, and based on many of the comments, that seems to be the case. This challenge has had some great moments. 

Here's a little more about the amazing guest reviewers for Teleport Us!

Alastair Reynolds is a science fiction writer and former space scientist. He was born in Wales in 1966, worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, and published his first SF short story in 1990. Since then he has published around fifty pieces of short fiction and ten novels, of which the most recent was Blue Remembered Earth (2012). Forthcoming is a sequel to Blue Remembered Earth, and a novel for BBC Books featuring Doctor Who in his third incarnation.

E. C. Myers was assembled from Korean and German parts in Yonkers, New York, where he was raised jointly by a mother and the public library. He is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and a member of the prolific NYC writing group Altered Fluid. He is the author of Fair Coin and Quantum Coin. In the rare moments when he isn’t writing, he blogs about Star Trek at theviewscreen.com, plays video games, watches classic films and television, sleeps as little as possible, and spends too much time on the Internet.

Brenda Cooper is the author of The Creative Fire, (Book One of Ruby's Song), and the The Silver Ship series. Though not intended as a Young Adult novel, book 1, The Silver Ship and the Sea, was selected by Library Journal as one of the year's 100 Best Books for YA and by Booklist as one of the top ten 2007 adult books for youth to read. The other books in the series are Reading the Wind and Wings of Creation. She is the author of Mayan December and has collaborated with Larry Niven (Building Harlequin's Moon). 

Chuck Wendig is the author of Blackbirds, Mockingbird, Double Dead, Bait Dog, and Dinocalypse Now. He currently has 178 more novels in development. His website contains a metric ton of writing advice, much of which will be collected and published by Writers Digest as The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience.

Adam Christopher is a novelist and Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning editor, and is the author of Empire State, Seven Wonders, and The Age Atomic from Angry Robot, and the forthcoming Shadow's Call from Tor Books. Adam’s fiction has appeared in Pantechnicon, Hub, and Dark Fiction Magazine, and when not writing he can be found drinking tea and obsessing over comics.

Kat Howard is a fiction writer, blogger, editor, and the instructor of our recurring sci-fi & fantasy class. Her short fiction has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and the anthology Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. Her nonfiction has appeared on Tor.com, and is frequently on Fantasy-Matters.com, where she is also the content editor.

Joseph Nassise is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the internationally bestselling Templar Chronicles series. He also teaches courses at LitReactor on eBooks and urban fantasy. His work has been nominated for both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award, and he served two terms as president of the Horror Writers Association. 

Lynne M. Thomas is a two-time Hugo Award winner and co-editor of numerous sci-fi anthologies, including Chicks Dig Time Lords (2010) with Tara O’Shea, Whedonistas (2011) with Deborah Stanish, and Chicks Dig Comics (2012) with Sigrid Ellis. She's also the editor-in-chief of the Hugo Award-nominated Apex Magazine, an online professional prose and poetry magazine of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mash-ups of all three. 

Dana Fredsti is the author of Plague Town and Murder for Hire: The Peruvian Pigeon. A past president of the professional organization Sisters in Crime, she has also appeared in various zombie/horror movies projects, and she worked on Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness as an armourer's assistant, sword-fighting captain, and sword-fighting Deadite. You heard that right: She was a Deadite in Army of Darkness. 

John Joseph Adams is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Oz Reimagined, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Epic: Legends of Fantasy, and Other Worlds Than These. He is a six-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a four-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor and publisher of the magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is the co-host of Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.