Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Genius loci

With Genius loci, Futures this week welcomes back S R Algernon to the section. No stranger to this sector of the Galaxy, S R Algernon has previously written stories on topics as diverse as tardigrades in space, the truth about Hell and how interplanetary war really works. Here, he takes a moment to reveal how postgraduate study influenced his latest tale — as usual, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Genius loci

The genesis of Genius loci came from those TV programmes where extraterrestrials are alleged to have built the pyramids or Stonehenge or some underwater rock formation or some such. It always puzzled me why they would travel vast distances to move some rocks around. I figured that these aliens must be rather eccentric.

It occurred to me that I did some rather eccentric projects in grad school (one of which involved plastic crates and bubble wrap), so maybe the aliens were graduate students getting their degrees in palaeolithokinesiology or something. The story did not work well as I initially conceived of it, so I switched the roles and made the protagonist a human visiting an alien world for his own abstruse purposes.

This story dovetailed into another television mainstay that I wanted to explore, namely the ghost hunter or the New Age healer. What if the shaman or faith healer were actually capturing a hapless visitor to provide free medical care? It allowed the low-tech locals to outwit a culturally oblivious outsider, and maybe it works just as well as a metaphor for postgraduate studies. Who hasn’t felt, at one time or another, like their own dissertation work or projects had become entangled in someone else’s ambitions?

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