Natural Selection

Inspiration

Natural Selection was originally written for Task One of the 2007-8 SlingInk Eurofiction Competition. The prompt used was "Write a story called 'The Interview'". Under its original title of - not surprisingly - The Interview, it was placed 13th equal out of a total field of 57.

Webcasts

Under its new (and somewhat more compelling) name, Natural Selection was recorded and made available as a webcast in September 2009 by Short Story Radio. The producer was Ian Skillicorn and the reader was Charles Armstrong.

Notes

This story owes more than a little to a much older one of mine called The Killer Instinct, dating back to May 1993, when it was the first ever winner of the Verulam Writers' Circle Crystal Decanter Competition. This had a similar theme of an employee being tested to see how far he might go to get the perfect job, except that in this story, the protagonist had been in the job for some times, only to be stymied by an incompetent superior. Under its new name of Accidental Death of a Manager, it was subsequently published, in January 1994, in the long-defunct print magazine Freelance Informer.