Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Wasteland of sand and ice

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Tomás McMahon with his story Wasteland of sand and ice. Tomás is an A-level student in England, but he kindly took some time out from his studies to reveal more about the inspiration for his tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Wasteland of sand and ice

An alien walks out of his UFO to make first contact and immediately dies of asphyxiation. Owing to a miscalculation of the landing site’s solidity, its descent had thrown up more dust than predicted, blocking the visitor’s respiratory apparatus, and resulting in suffocation.

It always struck me as absurd as to why extraterrestrials are depicted as arriving at Earth in person — or rather in alien in this instance — with no prior unmanned — or rather … OK, I’ve already made that joke — missions. A total of 44 satellites and rovers have been sent to Mars and, as of yet, not one human. Why would an alien be any different and travel halfway across the Galaxy before something expendable told them it was safe?

In his TED talk on the future of aerospace engineering, Burt Rutan quipped that the reason NASA found no life on Mars was because they kept landing in the deserts. That got me thinking: what conditions would be required for an alien probe to believe Earth to be similarly uninhabited? The results of my thought experiment manifested themselves in Wasteland of sand and ice.

‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ To my understanding, what Oppenheimer meant when he recounted his viewing of the world’s first atomic blast was that the human race had achieved a level of power previously only reserved for the gods of legend. In my final rewrites of Wasteland, I wanted the only characters in the story to be autonomous robots, like the one Earth had incorrectly identified as a meteoroid. I decided these robots should be satellites, whose military prowess was on the level of divine, and hence took the names of the Slavic, Chinese and Taíno native North American thunder gods, respectively. Although deities may be at home more in high fantasy than science fiction, I think it’s appropriate that the nations in Wasteland unanimously looked for divine intervention when they were in crisis.

By my bed, I have a Sony Cube Clock Radio, which is 24-hour and digital. In 2018, before I go to sleep, I have to set the time I want to wake up the next day, however, soon I expect clocks will be calculating this time for me. From the abolishment of serfdom and slavery to cars and chatbots, autonomy is an aspect of life that is more prevalent than ever before. Even though I have to admit it’s unlikely that military satellites running on artificial intelligence will be in orbit and operational by 2037, it’s undoubtable that this trend is set to continue.

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