This week’s Futures tale is Reversal of misfortune by J W Armstrong, the second of his stories to appear in Futures (the first, A final problem, was published under the pen name A C Doyle). The origins for both these stories are explored in this blog post.

Writing Reversal of misfortune

I was an ardent science-fiction fan as a boy, reasonably knowledgeable about the canon up to my mid-teenage years.  But then it was college/grad school/family/work and I fell behind on my reading.  However, during this time — and often inspired by events at work — SF story ideas, independent at least and original I think, occasionally suggested themselves.  I sometimes wrote these down as story fragments.  I was happy with a few and flirted with developing them and submitting for publication.  But I was busy and, in any case, I figured there was always time to do this tomorrow.

You might be wondering:  “What does any of this have to do with Reversal of misfortune”?  The connection is this:  two years ago I had a stroke, with many of the usual stroke-related problems (however, happily, speech and cognition appeared unaffected).  I had excellent care, I worked hard at rehabilitation, and after nine months my doctors declared me as good as new.

Except, of course, for the residual effects.  The relevant one for Reversal of misfortune is that, post-stroke, I have vivid and dark SF-related dreams — dreams that draw both on classical SF themes and on my own ideas and fragments from previous years.  I took to keeping a pad of paper next to my bed and writing, when I awoke, a summary of each dream — thinking this information might be useful for my neurologist (it wasn’t).  Some are disconnected, gruesome dream-stuff — the sorts of dreams that, had you admitted to them, might have got you burned at the stake in an earlier era.  Some have been ideas requiring a longish backstory or extensive character development to make a coherent story.  A few were basically a single idea.

For these, instead of scribbling a summary, I went to the word processor and wrote the dream down (typically at 4 a.m., in a white heat) before I forgot it.  These stories involve technical ideas (quantum mechanics, probability, artificial intelligence, time travel) the nuances of which, at least, might be unfamiliar to a general reader.  I thought they might be candidates for Futures, though — the backgrounds of Nature and Nature Physics readers meant I would not have to expend words, precious in a one-page piece, explaining things.  (Additionally — disclosure here — I’ve published several Letters in Nature and I figured it would be a big ego trip to publish also in Futures.)

So I submitted and two have been accepted.  The first was a Sherlock Holmes/quantum physics piece, A final problem, written, for obvious reasons, under the pen name “A. C. Doyle”.  The present Reversal of misfortune is a what-if commentary involving the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.  In both cases these came from stroke-stoked dreams and were written very quickly.  I was delighted at each acceptance!

Of course, I don’t wish medical problems on anyone; in particular, I really wish that I had not had that stroke.  The marginal upside has been an apparent organization of subconscious ideas — and the intimation of mortality that pushed me to take action on them.