Winning Story 2004
The winning story Lost Things Saved in Boxes by Deirdre Ruane
Some comments on this story by our judges:
Lois McMaster Bujold: Smooth writing on the whole, very inventive, good word-play, and with a lot of laugh-out-loud or at least chuckle-quietly moments.
Chris Priest: I hope winning the prize will act
as a stimulus for Deirdre to attempt
greater things. She has a dry and witty approach to a sharp idea,
and I hope she turns out to have many more ideas like it.
Peter F. Hamilton: The characters are rather nicely defined by what they're looking for, and I wanted to go with them through the alphabet. There are some wonderful ideas of what can be found lurking for every letter, some of which made me laugh out loud.
Michael Carroll: It's got a great idea, nice characterisation, good texture and atmosphere.
About the story, by the author
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| Deirdre Ruane |
When I was very young I had an alphabet picture book. Most of us did, I suppose, but this one was an odd little story about an ant and a bee searching an alphabetical series of boxes for their lost hats. It became part of me, the way things do when you're that age.
Then, in 2000, I found Alan Sondheim's Lost Project - thousands of people from all over the net, anonymously entering details of things they'd lost, both real and intangible - from floppy discs to childhood toys to their sense of purpose. You had a sense of all these lost things mounting up somewhere, some sorely missed, some forgotten, all with a sort of loneliness and menace about them. I started wondering - if there really was a place where everything lost ended up, how would it work? What if it disregarded time and space so that it could store anything, no matter how unusual or abstract? What would its dangers be? And are some things better off lost?
I finally started the story in November 2003, on the night ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, switching to paper when my laptop batteries died, as The Exorcist played on the movie screens. (I like writing in strange places.) It was supposed to be a chapter of a novel I'm working on, "The End of Words", but insisted on standing alone.
About Deirdre
The first thing I ever wrote was a rather regrettable story about fairies living on motorway verges in Dublin city, when I was eight years old, but luckily I've improved a bit since then. I'm 26 now and living in London with my boyfriend Matthew, my flatmate Jo and two rats called Jack and Meg, working as a sixth-form teacher.
My first loves were hard SF and high fantasy - swords and spaceships all the way - but these days my favourite writers are the ones who play around with dreams and reality, and set their stories in something superficially like the real world but with twists that slowly become apparent: people like Jeff Noon, Michael Marshall Smith, Alasdair Gray, Jonathan Lethem... (stop me or I'll be here all day).
I'm thrilled to have won this award - it's the first real recognition I've had, but besides that, I met James White at an Octocon and was around when the award was being set up, so it means a lot to me.
What would I like to achieve in the future? Well, I'm certainly
going to keep writing, though now with much more confidence. I've
got two novels on the boil (besides the one Lost Things was supposed
to be part of, there's one appropriately enough set in a hospital,
though it's a mental hospital in a near-future/alternate-present
London where ideas can warp reality). I want to keep learning my
craft, because there's a long way still to go, and keep writing
about the deep oddness in ordinary things.
