Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Grains of wheat

Regular Futures author Alex Shvartsman this week presents a cautionary tale in the shape of Grains of wheat, which explores the world of pharmaceuticals. Alex has previously tackled a range of topics in Futures, from advertising to alien invasion and the perils of time travel. His first tale for Futures was Ravages of time, and the story The rumination on what isn’t appeared in the Futures 2 anthology. He also teamed up with Alvaro Zinos-Amaro to write about coffee. You can find out more about what Alex is up to at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here he delves into the backstory for Grains of wheat — as ever you need to read the story before venturing farther.

Writing Grains of wheat

I played chess when I was a kid, and I learned of its supposed origin story early on. It went pretty much the way Rohana describes it: an ancient monarch loved the game so much that he wanted to reward the inventor and magnanimously offered him an opportunity to name his own remuneration.

The inventor asked to be paid in wheat (or rice, depending on the version of the story): a single grain for the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, and so forth. The total would equal 2 to the 63rd power + 1, which is many times more than our entire planet can produce annually, even with modern agricultural techniques.

The story illustrates how quickly exponential sequences can grow. From very humble beginnings, it takes only a small handful of moves for the numbers to run far beyond what could possibly be manageable. And that makes for a perfect revenge plot.

There’s quite a lot going on in this story for its length: the exponential sequences mathematics, the ethics of investing resources into research for very rare diseases that afflict few people, the pricing of life-saving medicines, the exploration of how much a man might give up to prolong their life. But at its core, it is a basic morality tale of comeuppance.

When writing this story, the main sticking point for me was to figure out how Rohana could execute her plan once it’s revealed to Green, despite his overwhelming resources. Green isn’t the sort of man who’d play by the rules in this situation. What if he tried to reverse engineer one of her pills? What if he was to send mercenaries to capture her, or corporate spies to infiltrate her lab? I spent entirely too much time figuring out exactly how she could do this and win, and even timed the reveal at the one-week point (seventh square) to better control how much time he had left to act. But inserting all of this information into the story would detract from its overall point, would slow the pacing too much and bog it down in minutiae. So I did what one does when writing flash: I sketched instead of drawing. There are hints of Rohana’s plan in her reveal, just enough of them so that the reader would hopefully believe she can pull it off.

A crucial element to the success of any revenge plot story is that the reader must want to root against the bad guy. I took advantage of the first person point-of-view to show how Green thinks and the sort of person he is. If I succeeded in this, then the reader will tolerate the moral ambiguity of Rohana’s actions and root for her to succeed, too.

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