The Jamverse Jam worldbuilding contest closes today, July 31, at midnight Pacific Time, in less than 24 hours. If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at making up small world-building artifacts, this is your chance. No limit on number of entries. AI use is not just allowed but encouraged.
The Jamverse is a shared extended universe, full of strange rules, based on four story cycles by four authors that we’ve been publishing over the last year. The 15 connected stories so far feature near-future cities, a train route that wraps halfway around the planet, unsettling AR technologies, and strange modern myths. The name is a reference to Fred Pohl’s famous assertion that the task of the science fiction writer is to predict the traffic jam, not the automobile.
Our goal is to try and bootstrap a more complex and rich protocol fiction world full of interesting “traffic jams,” based on this initial scaffolding, involving many more contributors, stories, and world features.
Here are a few useful links.
A codex of the existing world you can browse for inspiration/provocation.
Contest entry page (there’s a card-draw based prompting system if you need ideas)