Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Ferromagnetism

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back D. A. Xiaolin Spires with her new story Ferromagnetism. Regular readers will remember her story DNA exchange, which appeared in Futures earlier this year. You can find out more about D. A. Xiaolin Spires at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the secrets of her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Ferromagnetism

This story sprang out of a whirling cyclone of hypotheticals that got lodged in my head, spinning and spinning, and wouldn’t leave until I collated them and wrote out them out. I never really thought about these questions as discrete entities and lined them up in this way, though. I think the story just kind of came out, and these questions were probably implicit in my discovery process through writing, that I’m only enumerating them now, ex post facto:

What if affection could be felt, made tangible? What if it was a palpable common force that was not only unwanted, but taboo and outlawed, a kind of ‘unlawful other’ in a mechanical community? What if, in this world, elements classified with the atomic-numbers-as-we-know-them didn’t exist, but instead there were native elements that formed their own compounds, so mundane — but absolutely unimaginable to us? Yet, what if one of the confounding ‘outside’ elements with an actual atomic ‘numeral’ number made its way into this world, illicit and reactive as a drug?

And — what if you looked into the eyes of those around you, your kin, your family, all your people and they were all just versions of you?

Sometimes, people go insular. They start believing the boundaries they contributed in constructing are ‘it’. They start perceiving that everything else is contagion, is dangerous and polluting. It snowballs, a fiery sense of needing to protect, to assert these lines, to build them up. They start putting a stake in their own identity around these boundaries, convinced that anything let in will be nothing short of contamination.

Sometimes people need to open up their sensory orifices, let down their guard and feel a tug at something so distinctive — yet so familiar — while taking a good scan at their own selves.

Maybe that’s what inspired me. Maybe not. Hard to tell.

I have a feeling current events might have to do with it, though.

This was difficult story for me to reflect back on and write about. I think it’s because there’s much more subliminally happening in my head that transfers onto the page when I’m striking down the keys, that comes up and out in some sort of gestaltic ==whoosh== than I can’t really take it apart after-the-fact and figure out what it is that made me write it. Especially true for this one. But, I hope this post gets at a sense of it, even though I feel like I didn’t pin ‘it’ down exactly — whatever ‘it’ may be!

I think digging out this source of insight, might be like unearthing atomic number *##@%~ in our world. Maybe it’s there, but it’s really elusive, and keeps slipping away!

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