Heaven's Vault: Call for Authors

This year is inkle's 15th anniversary, and those of you who've been following our journey will know there's one project which is very dear to our hearts, that we keep coming back to in different formats, again and again: Heaven's Vault. Since we first conceived of the Nebula - with its robots and rivers in space - ten years ago, it's remained a place that we've longed to revisit.

One way we did go back was through a series of novels, spanning the story of the game and beyond, written by the game's lead writer (hi!)

Now we want to try something different and open the doors to other contributors.

Introducing: Tales from the Nebula

That's why today we're launching a new project: Tales from the Nebula. The goal is to create a book of short stories and fables from the world of Heaven's Vault, written by authors new to the world, which we'll then collate together and publish sometime in 2027.

There's only part of the project missing, and that's where you might come in. We want to commission up to twenty stories set in our world.

Here's the idea:

send us a pitch for your story idea via the form: a hundred words or so outlining what you want to do
send us another sample short story that demonstrates your ability to write (purely for judging purposes)
we'll pick and commission ~ 20 writers, paying a flat fee of £500 (~$600) dollars per story
final stories should be 2,000 - 4,000 words long
they need to fit into the world of Heaven's Vault but they don't exactly need to be canon
they can use Ancient, if you know it...!
because it's our world, we'll buy an exclusive right to print the story, and you won't be able to resell it elsewhere without talking to us first
... but you'll be credited in the book, of course
use of AI is strictly forbidden. If you don't like writing, don't do it. There's plenty of people who love writing, so get out of the way, and don't be a doink.

We've done calls for short stories and excerpts in our games before, but this is the first time we've ever commissioned an anthology, so if we've missed anything these from the terms, let us know in the comments or by email and we'll upgrade them.

Submissions close end of November.

Open to everyone

Obviously, we'd love to receive submissions from famous and well-known authors: but it's okay if we don't. We'd also love to highlight and discover some new talent: if we get someone their first ever publication, that's a win for us too.

So if you'd like to apply, please do your thinking and then fill in the entry form here.

... and may the waters always carry you home!