Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Universal Parking, Inc.

As we usher in a new year, Futures is pleased to welcome James Anderson with his story, Universal Parking, Inc. James is professor of cognitive science at Brown University.  He read science fiction from an early age and desperately wanted to be the first human to discover a clam shell on Mars.  He has written many scientific papers and several books, most recently After Digital (Oxford, 2017), which discusses brain-like computing and how computer hardware of any kind determines what you can compute with it. Here, he reveals what inspired his tale for Futures — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Universal Parking, Inc.

This short short story is my first attempt at writing science fiction.

I have been reading science fiction in large quantities since I was in elementary school in the 1950s.  At that time, before megablockbuster movies and video games, science fiction was minor genre fiction, widely disparaged, a very guilty pleasure.

However, science fiction determined my career.  Among my favourite science fiction, both then and now, was Asimov’s Foundation series, which I read multiple times.  I wanted to be Hari Seldon, a ‘psychohistorian’ at the centre of the series.  A psychohistorian used tools taken from psychology and mathematics to predict the future course of human history.  Seldon predicted the imminent decline and fall of his contemporary Galactic Empire causing him no end of political problems.  In the books, Seldon’s difficulties were mingled with Asimov’s dazzling scientific extrapolation.

I knew what I wanted to do with my life.  But when it came time to go to college, I looked at many college catalogues and found no majors in psychohistory.  I decided I would have to construct my own programme, combining physics and neuroscience, leading directly to what I have done professionally ever since.

Even though it is short, my Futures story weaves together several strands including a tiny bit of psychohistory.  Parking is indeed an academic problem.  The physics is vaguely plausible.  Easy, rapid shifts between universes are highly unlikely.  More realistic is the ‘history’ thread.  When two societies first make contact, the agents are not necessarily the best of the breed.  Early explorers were often of dubious character, escaping problems at home and looking for a quick buck.  Contacts in North America between Europeans and Native Americans provide many sad examples.  I liked Western movies as well as science fiction when I was young. A major recurrent theme both in movies and historical reality was: “White man speak with forked tongue.”  So do parking scammers.

Every time a new and glamorous technology appears, the fraudsters are near the first wave.  Railroads beget stock-market manipulators.  Expensive miracle drugs beget fake expensive miracle drugs.  Computers beget hackers.

So what would happen when a couple of naive academics meet an interuniversal scammer?  Not much doubt who is going to lose.  Fortunately, though improbably, as in Westerns, a good guy appears at the last minute and saves the protagonists from their folly.  A learning experience, perhaps.

When I wrote this piece, I was in the process of buying a car. I find car names fascinating because they are chosen with great care and sometimes achieve genuine poetry.  Think of the associations of ‘Mustang’ or ‘Firebird Trans Am’.  A different universe would have a different poetry with different referents.

Comments

There are currently no comments.