Jamie Wahls has been awarded this year’s Sense of Wonder Scholarship, funded by George R.R. Martin to pay his tuition to the 2019 Clarion Workshop (June 23–August 3) at UC San Diego.

The scholarship, administered by The Clarion Foundation, seeks to encourage aspiring writers who strive to capture that sense in stories which cross the vast vista of interstellar space. The workshop, now in its 51st year, is hosted at the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego.

Wahls’ short fiction about transhumanism, regret, people falling in love with spaceships, galactic stewardship, and the dangerous security flaws in our mental architecture can be found in places like Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld.  He works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkley, Calif., a nonprofit that researches the question of how to make super-intelligent machines safe and useful.

Kim Stanley Robinson, celebrated science fiction writer and board member of the Clarion Foundation, said of Wahls, “One of the great delights of reviewing stories during application season for Clarion is coming across talents like Jamie’s. For George R.R. Martin to support up-and-coming writers through his ‘Sense of Wonder’ Scholarship is a tremendous gift to the next generation of science fiction authors.”

Find more about Wahls at what he describes as his “brutally minimalist” website jamiewahls.com.

[Based on a press release.]