They say now (“they” being the folks who claim to know) that, by the year 2026, more than 90 percent of the writing you will find on the Internet will be generated not by humans but by chatbots. Perhaps this will turn out to have been true; perhaps not. The claim may be much like those insistences commonly heard in the ’90s that, by the year 2000, all the world’s rainforests would be destroyed. That is to say, it’s a projection (in more than one sense). It is based on statistically accurate but ultimately unpredictable extrapolations from current human behavior. It may or may not come to pass.
Such predictions, whether about the death of ecosystems or the death of human nature, may be truthful in a strictly data-driven and conditional sense: If process x continues to happen at rate y, then event z will be the outcome. Yet they leave out the influence of the exact thing literature most closely studies: human change, or the role of the will. More, they leave out the influence Catholic literature most assiduously seeks to trace: the beneficial influence that grace may have, and surprisingly often does have, on human will.
In our time, real and reliable human voices with a deep and real connection to this mystery will be more urgently needed than ever. Without these voices, without the art of letters, our ability to know what is true will be debilitated or destroyed. Without them, we are all too likely to be deceived by fake content pretending to be real. And since the need for truth is as vital to our souls as the ability to breathe oxygen is to our bodies, it is well past time we got real about it.
It’s still worth trying to discover and reward goodness wherever goodness can be found.
Fortunately, we at Word on Fire Luminor are not alone in feeling a certain urgency. Just as the call for submissions for the Luminor short story contest was getting underway, a debate exploded on the Substack webzine The Republic of Letters about the state of contemporary short fiction. (NB: language and content advisory for anyone clicking beyond the initial link.) Some contributors to the debate felt short fiction to be currently enjoying a secret renaissance; others claimed the form had long since died. A handful of contrarians felt that not even Chekhov could compare to the earthy pleasures of a good Reddit AITA post. (For anyone blessedly not familiar with the latter acronym, think of it as standing for “Am I The . . . Antagonist?”, in lieu of another, less sanitized epithet beginning with “A.”)
While we can’t quite say “to each her own” about the last claim, there’s plenty to sympathize with in recent parallel conversations in online circles that express skepticism about literary prizes. Yes, these prizes are often given out for reasons that have less to do with literary merit than they might. Yes, the standards of literary merit themselves are sometimes skewed to reflect fashion more than what lasts. Yes, there’s a risk that even valid recognitions of value will create mimetic crises, in which people mistake the surface of merit for the substance of merit and praise what has been praised already merely because it has been praised already. All this notwithstanding, it is still worth trying to define what makes a good work of literature. It’s still worth trying to discover and reward goodness wherever goodness can be found.
These teapot tempests don’t always reflect consensus, but they do prove one thing conclusively: There are still enough people reading short stories, and developing thoughtful opinions about those stories, to fill many pages of many publications. It’s just that these conversations aren’t dominating legacy media.
In this atmosphere, we at Luminor are very pleased to announce the shortlist for our inaugural short story contest. For those unfamiliar with the conventions of literary contests, the stories listed here are not yet official “winners” of the contest, but each story listed here is still eligible for that honor. The final winner will be announced in October.
While we received many excellent submissions for this first contest, we identified those submissions not listed here to be not quite what we were looking for. Their authors are now free to submit those stories elsewhere, and we wish them every blessing as they do so. Authors’ names are not listed because the stories are still under blind review, meaning that contest judges have encountered them without personal information attached.
The shortlist, in alphabetical order, is as follows:
— “A Small, Delicate Thing”
— “Alone in a Room with Rhoda”
— “Eye of the Beholder.”
— “No Man’s Land”
— “Stag”
— “The Key”
— “The Layman’s Guide to Losing Everything”
— “The Widows’ Bench at Old South”
Once again, a winner will be announced in October. Congratulations to all the shortlisted pieces, and our sincere gratitude to every author who submitted.