The Futures story in this month’s Nature Physics is ‘Alienated’ by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. Sylvia has written for Futures before — ‘A long way from home’ appeared earlier this year, and her story ‘The front line’ features in the Futures 2 e-book anthology. You can find out more about her work at her website. Here she explores the inspiration behind her latest tale:

Writing Alienated

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably Doctor Who. What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe. — Terry Pratchett

I have been doing my best to write stories for Natures’ Futures series for two years now and I’m thrilled every time I have a story accepted. I have always loved to write about other worlds, ranging from banshees in our sewer system and dragons in our forest to rockets heading for the far reaches of space. My favourite challenge, though, is to write about our future within our own world. When I first started thinking about ‘Alienated’, I was thinking about space colonization. I grew up in the American West and so the idea of the frontier and encountering the residents (and painfully misunderstanding them) is very familiar to me.  A lot of science fiction is about space teams and government organizations and organized events and military. Whereas when I look at exploration on Earth, it’s been about solving a problem: a need for land, a way to distract problem people, a place to ship undesirables. I imagine after the initial age of discovery, the key to exploration will be commercial systems looking to solve immediate problems and make a profit.

The question for me then becomes: who are these people who will travel great distances for a harsh life on a world upon which they know nothing, when they can almost certainly never return. I’ve come up with a couple of answers to this question, none of them pretty.

So that’s how I started thinking about a penal colony set up in the clouds on Venus meant to keep a group of undesirables out of the way. That swiftly got complicated and I realized that I was too close to home — any change on Venus would draw a lot of scientific attention. In order to save the story, I pushed it farther away, both in terms of timescale and distance. I imagined the space age of discovery had finished and a more practical view of far-off worlds had reached us. The people funding the travel, those with commercial interests, would be focused on setting up the colony as cheaply and efficiently as possible. The only people with time to spare, to watch the environment and see what changes, would be those dragged out against their will.

Combine that with an unstable prison population and I had a story.

Adding detail is always a dangerous thing; I planted this firmly into our world with the Barbie doll because I can’t quite imagine a future without them. Purple fingerling potatoes are just such an incongruously weird thing to be planting as a starting point on a world far away from ours, it captured my imagination immediately. The schnapps, well, there’s a lot of alcohol in my stories; my characters have a tendency to drink to forget. I think, that’s an aspect of being in the middle of a fast-moving emotional world of a story, the narrator can be forgiven for wanting to escape.

And then there’s the xenobiology, or lack thereof.  I’ll hold my hands up there: it’s difficult to imagine how intelligent life could manifest on a faraway planet. A science-fiction writer can no longer rely on heavily made-up Star Trek aliens who were always recognizably human. Today’s story telling takes into account the diversity and breadth of possibilities that we have learned while we still only peek at outer space. That’s not to say that I think bright green gaseous life forms exist, let alone that they would likely populate future penal colonies without anyone noticing. But it was fun to imagine how these could exist so completely separately to us, with no means of communication.

My story relies more on imagination and every-day people than predictions of the future but then, so does Doctor Who, so at least I’m in good company.