Science fiction grandmasters Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson with Writers of the Future Contest 1997 grand prize winner Morgan Burke.

As the contest spread and became more international in scope, the awards event grew from a single evening to a week of activities, including the L. Ron Hubbard Writers’ Workshop, a symposium relating to science and SF, and even the sealing of a time capsule with predictions about life in the future. In 1988, a companion contest inspired by L. Ron Hubbard was founded to encourage new illustrators. In addition to attending their own workshop, the winners and top professional illustrators who served as judges then joined the writers at the 1989 Writers and Illustrators of the Future Awards Event.

	Heidi Stallman beams after first seeing her story “The Winds” in Volume XIII of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future.

To showcase the contest winners, and to give them the broadest possible exposure, venues for the awards event have been selected with the utmost care and planning. They have included the top of the World Trade Center in New York City, the American Booksellers Association Convention in Las Vegas, the theater of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Trusteeship Council Chamber of the United Nations, under the auspices of the Society of Writers at the U.N.

Then in 1995 and again in 1996, with the support of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the awards events took place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Astronauts Dr. Story Musgrave and Dr. Janice Voss served as keynote speakers and they, along with other NASA scientists and staff, helped forge a bond between the Writers and Illustrators of the Future and the community of space scientists who are making science fiction present-day reality.