Over the past month and a half, we’ve relished in each and every pitch, chapter, and submission to our latest Inkshares contest. With a wonderful theme like Space Opera, we had tales upon tales of alien exploration, human extinction, and madcap space adventures to pour through, and selecting one book to add to our Inkshares Collection (joining It’s All Fun and Games and Welcome to Deadland) was no easy task.

Three books made it to the tippity-top of the contest and will automatically be funded and turned into full-fledged, fully-published books: Space Tripping, a rollicking ride through inebriated, intergalactic travel; The Madness of Mister Butler, a mystical story about a man stranded on a strange planet with the voice of God in his head; and Champions of the Third Planet, a true space adventure about a group of kids who must band together to fight alien monsters on a faraway planet and save Earth.

And we are pleased as punch to reveal that Champions of the Third Planet, by writer/director Christopher Leone, has been selected for the Nerdist Inkshares Collection! You might recognize Leone from his work on the gripping SyFy miniseries The Lost Room or Parallels, on Netflix. Champions of the Third Planet is his first novel and a passion project that’s basically a love letter to his childhood. You can preview chapters and hear from Leone himself about the novel right here.

Congratulations to all the entries and winners of the Nerdist Space Opera Contest! And don’t forget, if there was a pitch you loved that didn’t make it through, remember that authors still have time to get enough pre-orders to publish through Inkshares.

Stay tuned for more updates from all the books in the Nerdist Collection, and keep your eyes peeled for details about Geek & Sundry‘s upcoming contest theme! We hear it’s a doozy…