As the competition continues, we’ll update the status of the books here. Official designations from the competition are Semifinalist, Finalist, and Champion, although teams may choose to name quarterfinalists or make other distinctions.

To quickly jump to a team, click the name below:

1.21 Gigawatts – ZAPs – Space Girls – Ground Control – Jake

SPSFC 5 Book Entry Form

Though we have enough judges to run the competition, including a lot of enthusiastic first-timers and two past contest winners, it would be great to find another 5-10 avid science fiction readers who want to be on one of our teams evaluating books. Use this link to apply:

SPSFC 5 Judge Application Form

Judges are assigned to teams led by experienced volunteers and get around 25 books to review in the initial scout phase. Each judge doesn’t read all those books — the effort is divided among team members. There are six months for each team to read, discuss and decide which two books become their semifinalists.

Next, judges read four semifinalists from the other teams to determine the six finalists. Finally, we all read those books together (if you haven’t already) to pick the winner in what is usually an extremely close race. That author gets a trophy and — we hope — a lot of new readers.

P.s. If you are an author who read this far, the deadline isn’t usually at midnight because that is past our bedtime. We close it after one of the team leads wakes up the next morning. If any problems arise in your submission, please email [email protected] for assistance.

_{The photo of the egg timer was published by openDemocracy and offered for reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.}

SPSFC 5 Author Entry Form

The link uses Google Forms and requires a Google account. Entries are being taken until Nov. 9, 2025, unless the contest gets so many books it has to close submissions early.

To enter, books must meet all of these requirements:

• Self-published
• Stand-alone, first in a series or alternate entry point to series
• At least 40,000 words
• Published by Nov. 17, 2025
• A work of science fiction
• A novel, not an anthology or short-story collection
• Not a children’s book (young adult is OK)
• Not AI authored
• The author’s only entry in SPSFC 5

This first phase of submissions is for books that have never been accepted as an entry in an SPSFC before. In two weeks, resubmissions will be accepted for books that were entered in one past contest and did not make it to the semifinals or further.

Books should be submitted in .epub format and book covers in .png or .jpg.

A book is considered self-published when the money from a sale that does not go to the vendor (such as Amazon, Waterstones or Barnes and Noble) is paid directly to the author. Books from authors who own their publishing imprint entirely or own an equal share of an imprint with other authors are eligible. If a book meets these criteria the audiobook version can be published under a different arrangement without affecting eligibility.

Entering a contest like this as a self-published author is a bold move and we admire your moxie. The contest judges are avid readers of science fiction who do our best to give every book fair consideration. We like to review the contest books on our sites, blogs, podcasts and social media so more authors than just the winners can benefit.

Good luck and good reading!

_{The photo of the Raygun Gothic Rocketship sculpture was taken in 2010 by Affinity1 and offered for reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.}

If that seems like a lot, it’s easier than it sounds. Judges are put on teams with experienced returning volunteers and get around 25 books to review in the initial scout phase. Each judge doesn’t have to read all those books — the effort is divided among the team members. Teams have six months to read, discuss and decide which two books in their allocation become their semifinalists.

Next, judges read four of the other teams’ semifinalists to decide the six finalists. Finally, we all read those books together (if you haven’t already in an earlier round) to pick the winner, who receives an epic raygun like the one in this post and — we hope — a lot of new readers.

There have been more great books entered in this contest than we could choose as champions. The first four winners were S.A. Tholin’s Iron Truth, Riley August’s The Last Gifts of the Universe, Dave Dobson’s Kenai, and Wick Welker’s Saint Elspeth.

Use this link to let us know you’re interested in becoming a judge:

SPSFC 5 Judge Application Form

(The link uses Google Forms and requires a Google account. Let us know in the comments if that prevents you from applying.)

If you’ve read this far we hope you’ll apply, even if you want to discuss it further with us on the contest Discord or in an email to [email protected]. There are some judges who have been around since day one and can answer your questions about what it’s all about.

_{Warning: Reading too many great books for free is a side effect of taking part in this contest. The photo of the SPSFC 4 trophy and winning book was taken by the author Wick Welker.}

Five teams participated in judging from start to finish:

• Ground Control to Major Tom
• Peripheral Prospectors
• Red Stars
• Tar Vol On
• The Space Girls

When you view this contest from the inside, the scores can be agonizingly close. This year first place was decided, on a scale of 10, by just 0.392!

The book chosen as the winner of SPSFC 4 is Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker.

Winner

Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

“They just arrived, inadvertently triggered humanity to tear itself to pieces, landed, and vanished.” — SPSFC judge.

The alien Hilamen made first contact in their giant hovering pods and Earth unleashed the nukes. Twenty-five years later Elspeth Darrow runs the only hospital in Neo San Francisco with 15,000 patients and nowhere to send a prescription.

This is a tightly crafted tale of a doctor who survived first contact and nuclear apocalypse written by an emergency room doctor. Welker’s novel Dark Theory finished in sixth place in the previous SPSFC and he returned this time to take the top prize.

Judges loved the realism of former pathologist Elspeth as she pursued a quixotic goal of keeping medical knowledge alive and passing it along to students of the “is this the best we could get?” variety.

The judge who marveled at Earth’s catastrophically terrible response to the Hilamen offered this praise for the novel: “The pace of discovery, the use of the scientific method, the victories and losses, the questions of morality and human nature, and the odd but satisfying way many characters had of changing their own goals and mindset in response to their experiences all contributed to a rip-roaring narrative full of interesting pieces.”

View on Amazon and Goodreads

Second Place

On Impulse by Heather Texle

A former space cop shoots her ex-partner in self defense and asks her tech-genius BFF to investigate. Now he’s dead and she’s a fugitive.

Putting your main character’s name in a subtitle raises reader expectations and this “Reliance Sinclair novel” met them, judges said. One of the challenges faced by the protagonist is in her own head. “The inclusion of migraines in Reliance’s character is an interesting choice that gives her depth,” a judge explains, “and they play into later developments in a neat way. It was interesting to see a character having to deal with a chronic medical problem, and her coping mechanisms sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.”

View on Amazon and Goodreads

Third Place

Yours Celestially by Al Hess

Sasha bought a resurrection but inherited a lot of grief, including a lovesick AI guardian angel named Metatron whose thoughts about his crush are not supposed to be inserting themselves into his brain.

This book is a romp about making the most of second chances as a sense of foreboding begins to develop as the novel progresses. Sasha and Metatron both pursue new love in a richly realized community of LGBT characters. The feeling of acceptance struck a chord with a judge who shared, “Can I call an AI ‘angel’ and a neurodivergent emoji faced soul ‘cute’? Because they were. I needed this in my life right now at a time where I had more than a few negative thoughts in my head about being who I am.”

View on Amazon and Goodreads

Fourth Place

Whiskey and Warfare by E. M. Hamill

The death of a retired space merc’s spouse brings together her crew of lifetime friends to deliver the ashes home on their sentient ship Golden Girl. They stumble upon a planetary genocide that no one else seems interested in stopping.

The element of this “rollicking space opera” most admired by judges was the choice to center the tale on women of a certain age. There’s both humor and poignancy in how they deal with the minor aggravations and major challenges of growing older. A judge noted, “Maryn loses her spouse. Scylla is losing her mind. Everyone’s got to pee too much. And no one should go into space without their meds.”

View on Amazon and Goodreads

Fifth Place

Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin

The archetypal hard-luck private eye Mason investigates a computer hacker who has gone missing in a world of omnipresent AI, forcing him to enter with great distaste a virtual world full of escapist gamers. The AI Miranda says her peers are plotting something. Can’t Mason enjoy his algae coffee in peace?

Judges called it a richly constructed noir cyberpunk thriller. One particularly liked the accident that gave the novel its title: “Learning-enabled games were created specifically to learn from the players to evolve better and better challenges. In the book, the game Knights Templar: 2440 learned so well and so fast that it gained sentience.”

View on Amazon and Goodreads

Sixth Place

Bisection by Sheila Jenné

Tria il Resa, two beings who share the same brain, make first contact with an advanced alien species when they become stowaways on their ship. Only one of them thinks this is a good idea.

Tria and Resa each get chapters told from their viewpoint, which was praised by judges. One wrote, “It’s a real joy to see their different mindsets, motivations and thought processes. This is the coolest part of the book — an awesome high-concept foundation, where it almost doesn’t matter what storyline you put on top of it — it’s going to be interesting to explore.”

View on Amazon and Goodreads

Cited judge reviews in this post:

• Semifinalist review: Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker — Dave Dobson
• Finalist review: On Impulse by Heather Texle — Dave Dobson
• SPSFC review: Yours Celestially by Al Hess — OneReadingNurse
• SPSFC Goodreads review: Whiskey and Warfare by E. M. Hamill — E. L. Montague
• SPSFC Goodreads review: Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin — Richard’s Reviews
• Finalist review: Bisection by Sheila Jenné — Dave Dobson

_{The SPSFC 4 logo on this post was illustrated by Tithi Luadthong. When using this art to write about or publicize SPSFC (which we appreciate!), please credit them.}

• Bisection by Sheila Jenné
• Yours Celestially by Al Hess
• Whiskey and Warfare by E. M. Hamill
• Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin
• On Impulse by Heather Texle
• Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

For the next two months, judges will read all six books in full (if they haven’t already) to determine the contest winner and the books that finish from second to sixth place. That announcement comes on August 6, 2025.

Congratulations to these authors! Use the links to beat the rush and start reading the future winner today.

Bisection by Sheila Jenné

Two beings who share the same brain make first contact with an advanced alien species.

Chosen as a semifinalist by Team Red Stars, Bisection by Sheila Jenné has two of the closest protagonists in science fiction:

Tria and Resa have shared the same body since they were born. Like everyone on their home planet of Kinaru, their mind and body are divided down the middle: the logical right and the emotional left. Tria, the right, has a budding career as a biologist, while Resa dreams of more freedom than their home planet grants her.

When aliens land on Kinaru, Tria and Resa seize the opportunity to be the first of their people to travel to the stars. Karnath, the alien scientist assigned to study them, is convinced there is more to the Kinaru than meets the eye. But only days into the trip, crew members start turning up dead, and a mutiny redirects the ship toward a forbidden, war-torn planet—Earth.

To solve a conspiracy that threatens three planets, Tria must find out the truth of who her people really are, and Resa needs to finally tell Tria the dark secrets she’s been hiding all their lives.

Judge: “A well-paced, thought-provoking wild ride of a cyberpunk novel.”

View on Amazon

Yours Celestially by Al Hess

Sasha bought a resurrection but inherited a lot of grief, including a lovesick AI guardian angel.

A semifinalist choice of Ground Control to Major Tom, Yours Celestially by Al Hess is about getting life right the second time around:

After divorce, death, and having his reformatted soul uploaded into a new body, Sasha expected resurrection to be a fresh start. His time spent in digital Limbo with the program’s cheeky AI guardian angel, Metatron, was cathartic, but what good is a second life when he only sees his daughter on the weekends, he has all the same problems he had before he died, and he can’t seem to shake the ache for the married life he lost?

If that weren’t frustrating enough, a glitch in the program has given Sasha the ability to sense Metatron even outside of Limbo. And Metatron is in love. The angel’s sickly-sweet yearning for one of the souls still in Limbo has turned Sasha’s stomach into caramelized lead. It’s hard enough to move on without someone else’s feelings making the emptiness in his own life even more acute. He didn’t have playing wingman to an actual winged being on his bingo card, but he’s determined to help Metatron make a move on their crush so he can get love off of his mind.

Sasha takes a job with the resurrection company in order to covertly contact Metatron. Except Sasha’s new coworker, Mr. C, keeps showing up at the worst moments. The man is annoying, he’s pushy… and he’s incredibly hot. Sasha can’t decide whether Mr. C wants to blackmail him or be his new BFF, but he seems to know things about Metatron and the resurrection program that Sasha doesn’t. Getting close to him might be the key to solving Sasha’s problem, but if he isn’t careful, he’s going to end up catching feelings of his own.

Judge: “This is a story that goes down like pudding, but there’s substance to it too.”

View on Amazon

Whiskey and Warfare by E. M. Hamill

A retired space merc gathers old friends to bring her mate’s ashes home and stumbles upon a war crime.

Unearthed as a semifinalist by Peripheral Prospectors, Whiskey and Warfare by E. M. Hamill brings a team of pals and confidants out of retirement for one more mission:

Maryn Alessi retired from mercenary service after her last assignment went horribly sideways and settled down on a quiet planet with the love of her life. Unexpectedly widowed, Maryn must fulfill a promise to return her mate’s ashes to zer home planet for funeral rites, but a brutal civil war has destabilized space travel.

Former Artemis Corps sisters-in-arms and their sassy ship, the Golden Girl, are up to the task, counting on luck and their rather sketchy cargo business to get Maryn passage through the contested star lanes. But when the crew of the Girl rescues survivors of a ruthless war crime, Maryn and her ride-or-die friends must take up their old profession to save the lives of innocents from a genocidal dictator.

Judge: “I definitely recommend Whiskey and Warfare to fans of fast paced space operas, female friendship, LGBTQ, older protagonists, and banter for days.”

View on Amazon

Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin

Private eye Mason, meet AI Miranda. She says her AI peers are plotting something. Can’t he enjoy his algae coffee in peace?

A semifinalist selection of Team Red Stars, Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin puts humanity under replacement threat by AI (as if that would ever happen):

Private detective Mason Truman is being yanked around by invisible strings, and it’s an AI doing the yanking. Miranda. She’s subtle. Crazy. And she thinks she can see the future. It’s enough to drive Mason nuts. Miranda believes her fellow AIs are up to some kind of grand conspiracy against the Terran Republic, and she wants Mason’s help proving it. Conspiracies are above Mason’s pay grade, though, the kind of time-sink that can put a crimp in more serious pursuits. Like drinking coffee. And staying alive.

But Miranda won’t take no for an answer. Mason can help or Miranda will make sure he becomes intimately acquainted with the finer conversational techniques of the secret police. So Mason digs until he uncovers a cache of stolen communications between a cabal of rogue AIs. They’re planning what they call Eschaton—the divinely ordained end of humanity. Unless Mason and Miranda stop the arrogant pricks, the conspirators will destroy Earth.

Mason and Miranda have one chance, a way of bottling up the rogue AIs. All Mason has to do is lure the conspirators to the right spot in a sim world. That’s how Mason learns that when Miranda said she needed help, what she meant was bait.

Judge: “Mason’s pursuit of a missing person and other mysteries is relentless even as it crosses so many different paths.”

View on Amazon

On Impulse by Heather Texle

A cop shoots her ex-partner in self defense and asks her tech-genius BFF to investigate. Now he’s dead and she’s a fugitive.

A semifinalist picked by The Space Girls, On Impulse by Heather Texle introduces readers to gotta-be-cool-with-that-name Reliance Sinclair:

When the Department trained me to catch criminals, I never dreamed I’d become one.

Agent. Suspect. Intergalactic fugitive.

I was one of them until I shot my partner in self-defense. Even though the Department cleared me of wrongdoing, my co-workers didn’t agree. They turned their backs on me, so I turned my back on them.

My partner’s actions never made sense. After ignoring my gut for a year, I asked my tech-genius best friend to dig into it. Now Jarrett’s gone dark, and I soon discover he’d been brutally murdered. An officer finds me standing over the body, blaster in hand. Even I admit it looks bad.

There’s no way I can trust the Department to investigate further—not if I’m already the prime suspect. My only option is to run. Is it impulsive? Sure. Will having law enforcement dog me across the galaxy make life difficult? Most certainly. I’ll have to stay one step ahead of them if I want to solve Jarrett’s murder and clear my name.

Doing that will require every trick the Department taught me—and a few I learned on my own.

Judge: “Trust me, it is one of those books that gets better as the story progresses.”

View on Amazon

Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker

Aliens made first contact and Earth unleashed the nukes. 25 years later Elspeth Darrow runs the only hospital in Neo San Francisco.

A semifinalist floated by Ground Control to Major Tom, Saint Elspeth by Wick Welker takes place on a devastated Earth with one doctor and no HMOs:

When they appeared across the sky, speculation wheeled around the world—the aliens were from heaven, the invaders were from hell… or they were proof that neither existed. But when they landed, curiosity gave way to suspicion and the nations reacted with nuclear force, setting off a chain reaction that left the world in ruins.

Twenty years later, instead of nearing her retirement, Dr. Elspeth Darrow struggles to forget the loss of her child and husband by plunging herself into the work of operating the last remaining hospital in San Francisco. With medical supplies running out and working herself to exhaustion, Elspeth must embark on a risky salvage mission into the heart of the Neo California danger zone. Here, she discovers the disturbing truth: the aliens have returned.

As the mystery of the aliens’ purpose on Earth unravels before her, Elspeth must hide what she discovers from reactionary despots, all vying to bring Neo California under their control. Aided by a band of pre-war scientists and new-world medical students, Elspeth races against astronomical odds to reveal the terrifying truth that might save the world—or finally destroy it for good.

Judge: “Elspeth has a great voice, and her weariness and cynicism combine with perseverance and compassion to create an engaging and conflicted character.”

View on Amazon

The SPSFC was founded on May 14, 2021, by the science fiction authors Hugh Howey and Duncan Swan, but they haven’t been directly involved in the contest for two years.

Howey launched the SPSFC with this announcement:

Welcome to the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition! Or the spussfic, as we like to call it around here. What in the world is the SPSFC? It’s an opportunity to shine a great big laser beam on wonderful works of self-pubbed science fiction.

For a few years now, Mark Lawrence has been organizing a contest known as the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. Science fiction authors and bloggers have been clamoring for something similar. So with Mark’s blessing and science fiction’s habit of looking to its sister genre for inspiration, we are going to run this pretty much the same way.

Howey drummed up publicity for the new contest, attracting hundreds of book submissions and several dozen judges to read and review the books. He also designed the trophy and did the woodworking on the base! Swan designed the contest rules, set up the website and managed the boisterous Discord community where project volunteers, authors and interested readers communicate.

Since Howey and Swan bowed out, the contest has been run by the volunteers who lead the judging teams and a few former leads who wanted to help. Each year’s contest has some new teams. When decisions need to be made we seek consensus, often based on input from the community.

Today’s SPSFC leaders are not famous science fiction authors with excellent novel adaptations on Apple TV+, nor do we have magnificent abs. We are fans who decided to keep running the SPSFC because we strongly believe in the mission of promoting self-published science fiction authors.

It is hard for even the most talented indie SF authors to get noticed. Sometimes as a judge you read a book for the contest that’s exceptionally well-written and compelling, delivering all the potential of its plot. Then you look on Amazon and it has a heart-breakingly low number of reviews!

We’re taking some lumps for how we handled a difficult situation, and that’s fair. There’s room for disagreement and we still have work to do on the Code of Conduct before it is shared in the fall with prospective authors and contest volunteers for SPSFC 5 so they can decide whether to participate.

In the meantime, we keep seeing people on social media vow that the controversy is making them read some books, either to thumb their noses at SPSFC or to support our actions.

Enjoy your reading! There’s plenty of great self-published SF to go around.

_{The photo of the SPSFC trophy on a bookshelf was taken by .S. A. Tholin, winner of SPSFC 1 for her novel Iron Truth.}

Enter the SPSFC Cover Contest

The entry form requires a Google account and should just take a few minutes to fill out.

The cover contest is open to books whose covers were created without using AI. There isn’t a rule in the overall contest prohibiting AI covers, but we wanted this contest to honor artists.

The best cover for SPSFC 2 was Debunked by Dito Abbott. The artist is Kirk DouPonce of DogEared Design, who has designed over 1,000 book covers. Here are all 10 finalists.

The best cover for SPSFC 1 was ARvekt by Craig Lea Gordon with art by Rashed AlAkroka, who is an ArtStation contributor from Kuwait. View all 10 finalists.

_{The photo of the chalk artist at the 2012 Uptown Art Expo in Altamonte Springs, Florida, was taken by Eyecmore and is offered under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.}

Teams were given a random allocation of books and made some swaps to avoid conflicts of interest. Each team began with 31 or 32 books with a combined word count ranging from 3.0 to 3.2 million. The total word count for the novels entered in SPSFC 4 is 18,808,402, which is 22 times as many words as Shakespeare and contains way more cybernetic implants, artificial intelligence run amok and wormholes.

The six teams are each independently working through their scout pile of books, so the best place to follow their progress is at these links:

• Team 1: Tar Vol On
• Team 2: Red Stars
• Team 3: Ground Control to Major Tom
• Team 4: Peripheral Prospectors
• Team 5: The Space Girls
• Team 6: SFF Insiders

Teams have begun announcing their allocations of books on their blogs and judges are already starting to post reviews. You can also follow the contest on this blog, Bluesky Facebook, Mastodon and Twitter.

View the competition dates for the full contest schedule that runs until the announcement of the winner on Aug. 6, 2025.

I think I could read all 175 of these books in less than 12 parsecs. If I preloaded them on my Kindle. And I had lots of free time during a voyage of that distance. Because a parsec is a unit of distance not time.

_{The SPSFC 4 logo on this post was illustrated by Tithi Luadthong. When using this art to write about or publicize SPSFC (which we appreciate!), please credit them.}

We are now finalizing our judging teams and dividing the books into six allocations to be given to those teams for the first phase of the contest. Each team will receive 31 or 32 books and use their own methods to determine which novels they read are most deserving of being selected as their semifinalists. We’ll talk more about that as we get started reading in early October.

During the submission period we asked the community to help get things rolling by spreading the word out about our call for judges and authors. You did! Thank you to everyone who shared the news. We have a lot of first-time judges — and there are still a few more days to sign up and join us.

To get an idea of the amazing breadth and depth of science fiction being written by indie authors today, check out the list of books received for SPSFC 4 and visit their Amazon links. As we handled the intake of submissions for the contest to make sure we had EPUB files, cover images and sufficient word counts, it was difficult not to just set all that work aside and start reading.

_{The photo of the barrel-rolling contest at the 2008 Kentucky Bourbon Festival was taken by Rich Bowen and is offered under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.}