About
A serious home for human-machine fiction.
Fiction with a human author, a machine collaborator, and nothing to hide.
Mission
Story, taste, process, and responsibility.
The awards exist for people with stories, worlds, images, arguments, and emotional truths they want to bring into fiction. Writing craft matters, but it should not be the only gate.
AI-assisted workflows can be another artistic medium: a palette, an instrument, a revision partner, and a way to shape what is inside the author into a work that can move another person.
The work must stand as fiction. The workflow matters because it shows how a human author guided the direction, made taste calls, shaped machine assistance, and accepted responsibility for the result.
Founder’s note
Why I started this.
I write novels in long, structured collaboration with AI systems — outlining with them, arguing with them, drafting with them, and making every call about what stays. Every book I publish past my first includes a page about that process, because I think readers deserve to know how a thing was made, and because I’m not embarrassed by the answer. I’m proud of it.
The In Silico Awards exist because I believe this is a legitimate way to make fiction, and legitimacy needs institutions: not a defensive crouch, not a culture-war position — a room with standards in it. My ethic on tooling is short enough to say in one breath. Use the tools. Credit the tools. Show what you made together. And make it good.
The awards judge stories first. The dossier exists so that a human being can be seen making the taste calls. I try to live that standard myself — this site’s own dossier is published on the colophon page — and I hold the same line I offer entrants: proprietary craft is allowed; secrecy about authorship is not.
If you carry stories you haven’t been able to bring into the world — or you already work this way and want a place that takes it seriously — this is being built for you.
Michael Scur, founderHe writes fiction as M.D. Scur.
What this is not
Not raw output. Not opaque automation.
The In Silico Awards are not a contest for unreviewed model output, content farming, plagiarism, style imitation, or undisclosed automation. The standard is human-directed, rights-conscious, transparent, and story-first.