Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Under an uncaring sky

This week’s story from Futures is Under an uncaring sky by William Meikle. No stranger to Futures, William has previously warned of the extraterrestrial dangers of Twitter, has tried to save the world with a fungus, has discovered the perils of lacunae, and found a novel way to control a classroom full of alien-controlled children. Author of 20 novels and countless short stories, William can be found on his website or you can follow him on Twitter to see what he’s up to. Here he reveals what brought about his latest apocalyptic vision. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Under an uncaring sky

Coincidentally, the story of a possible Maunder Minimum event broke on the day that I sold this story to the editors at Nature Futures, but the roots of it go back a long way for me.

I’ve got a science degree, in botany from Glasgow University, gained in the dim distant past when the world was young and grants were plentiful. A lot of my fiction has its roots there, and has its branches in the reading I was also doing at that time. Much of that reading was apocalyptic in nature, from Stephen King’s The Stand to Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time series, and Niven and Pournelle’s big-budget disaster novels. It was only natural that some of that would seep in to my own writing once I got going.

But probably the main influence was my other reading strand — in the otherness of Lovecraft, the paranoia of Kafka, and in the general air of pessimism arising in me as to our long-term fate as a species. Mix that in with growing up at the height of the NASA lunar missions and my never-fading sense of wonder and awe at the majesty of our cosmos, and you have some idea where this tale originated.

Global warming is well documented, and a well trodden path in fiction these recent years, but it was off-planet influences in our future that I was thinking about. One day last winter, I had an idea of a cold, dark environment, and of us hiding there, small and frightened and unable to do much about it. I wondered how that might play out.

And here it is.

Under an uncaring sky is a wee story of darkness, paranoia, a whimper at the end of all things, and our place in the Universe — hefty stuff for less than a thousand words, but the protagonist’s voice spoke to me and I wrote it down.

I think I’ve done him justice, but that’s for you to decide.

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