The story behind the story: Breakthrough

This week’s Futures story marks the welcome return of John Gilbey with Breakthrough. John will be familiar to regular readers as he has penned a number of Futures tales over the years (you can see a full list at the foot of this post). When not writing sci-fi, John can be found at the University of Rural England — though he might be easier to track down on Twitter. Here, he explains what sparked the creation of his latest work — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Breakthrough

When folk find out that I’m a science-fiction writer, they sometimes ask me where I get my ideas from. The answer I give is usually some variation on “it depends …”, as the stories emerge from a variety of sources.

Some, probably the largest group, come from my career in the research and higher-education community — often as a result of a half-heard conversation, an unexpected occurrence or getting a glimpse of an alternative future by noticing a tiny detail that could be a flaw in reality. For example, I once gave a talk in a lecture theatre built for a physics department in the 1960s. Behind the teak podium, a brushed aluminium panel hosted an arcane collection of vintage audio socketry and robust toggle switches. One such control was labelled ‘Summer / Winter’, which made me wonder if this was the remnant of some ancient quantum weather experiment. If I threw the switch, I pondered, would the outside world change from winter to summer? And if it did, would I be the only one to recognize the change? Well, what would you have done? Naturally, I tested the hypothesis. Sadly, it turned out it just changed the speed of the ventilation fans in the ceiling — or so I would have you believe …

Other stories arise from bets, often made with friendly editors. One such involved the alleged impossibility of building sympathetic characters around certain roles in the research infrastructure. This led to the creation in short order of three stories featuring a health and safety officer, a quality manager and a human-resources executive — tales that would probably not have emerged without the challenge being made.

Still others, including Breakthrough, arise from the people I’ve met through being a writer — such as people I’ve chatted to at conferences or workshops and vaguely kept in touch with since. One such acquaintance, Mariette DiChristina (editor-in-chief of Scientific American) recently posted a picture of her travels on Twitter. The image, of an old cyclotron electromagnet resting on a plinth in the grounds of a research institution in Japan, was arresting enough that I immediately commented “That sculptural installation would make a very nice starting point for a science-fiction story …”. Mariette’s rapid response, “Sounds like a good plan!”, left me with the enjoyable problem of writing a story that would account for the situation, engineer a science-fiction element and build a reasonably plausible tale. Breakthrough is the output from that process.

While doing research for my writing, both fiction and non-fiction, I’ve visited a number of particle-physics research installations. They are hugely complex environments that demand extraordinary levels of project management to develop and manage. As a project manager myself, I have great respect for anyone who takes on such a challenge — and anyone who did would be quite capable of finding a creatively sculptural use for a huge, heavy, unusable dipole magnet that a fictitious research institute had found itself lumbered with.

Naturally, I’m always happy to visit other interesting sites of scientific endeavour to talk to folk and learn more about the odd aspects of your particular discipline. Drop an e-mail to gilbeyATbcs.org.uk if you’d like to chat. Who knows, there might be a story in it.

Read more of John’s Futures stories