Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Shovelware

This week, Futures is delighted to present Shovelware by Bogi Takács. This is Bogi’s first appearance in Futures, but eir work has been published in many places, including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and Apex. You can keep up to date with Bogi’s work on eir website or by following em on Twitter. Here, Bogi kindly takes some time out to reveal the inspiration behind Shovelware — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Shovelware

I’m from Hungary, though I live in the United States at present. A lot of my stories are inspired by Hungarian politics, sometimes less directly, sometimes more so. In Shovelware, Hungarian politics  serves only as a grim backdrop, something that prompts escape. We don’t even get to find out exactly what happened this time, only that the Parliament was burning (or was it?) and that people belonging to minorities got the short end of the stick, as usual. As a Jewish trans person, I have seen this happen all too often.

The previous time I wrote a hard SF flash story involving Hungarian politics, Increasing Police Visibility (published in Lightspeed — Queers Destroy Science Fiction!), a completely made-up event in the plot came to pass shortly after publication. If the Parliament burns down, I would like to disclaim any responsibility well in advance!

I extrapolated the technology for extracting dream content from a research paper (S. Nishimoto et al. Curr. Biol. 21, 1641–1646; 2011). I set the story in the near future, because I think we will see industry applications relatively soon; and the same is true for drones that help with moving furniture. (Can I have one already?) It is certainly possible to have dreams — both regular and lucid — about non-existent video games, though I don’t know if anyone ever wrote an article about that very specific topic. There is some research about how video games influence dreams, but that’s more of the reverse situation.

Shovelware is a rather scornful game-industry term that’s used exactly the way it appears in my story. I wish I had made it up, alongside the entire shovelware phenomenon. This is the flipside of easier game development and better tools: faster development cycles also result in ever-larger amounts of junk. I’m wishing readers happy gaming and/or happy game development!

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