Futures is welcoming in the New Year in the way we know best: by meditating on the nature of life and death with Thomas Broderick’s story Chrysalis. Thomas is a freelance writer based in California, and you can keep up to date with his work by following him on Twitter. Here, he takes to the road to explain what inspired his latest story — as ever, it pays to read the tale first.

Writing Chrysalis

If you want to know how Chrysalis came to be, we should go on a day trip. I’m driving, and you’re riding shotgun in my blue Honda Fit.

We start in downtown Santa Rosa, California, just a few miles from where I live. On Mendocino Avenue, I point out The Press Democrat building, where Frank Herbert cut his teeth as a reporter in the 1950s. Herbert’s Dune taught me a lot about the nature of inspiration. I learned that inspiration for science fiction doesn’t have to come from science or technology. It can spring from anything, and the ideas may take years to incubate. For example, after Herbert first saw those sand dunes in Florence, Oregon, it took him a long, long time to invent Arrakis.

The first bit of inspiration that became Chrysalis, coincidentally, also involves sand.

We drive west out to the coast, a pleasant outing that takes us through rolling green pastures and dairy farms. The beach, however, is cold and foggy (as it should be). Along the waterline, I point out a narrow band of fresh water flowing into the ocean. The pattern made by the water looks like the branches of a tree, or neurons in the brain. At dusk, the rising tide destroys the pattern. When I first saw this cycle a few years ago, I thought it was a profound metaphor for life and death.

Mulling the idea for over a year, I imagined some young PhD in neurocybernetics observing the same sight, he or she coming up with the same metaphor as I did. What if that person then stood up and proclaimed: “I dedicate my life’s work to ensuring that no man or woman will fear the rising tide — death itself — ever again.”?

This was the first question.

Continuing south on Highway 1, we arrive in Point Reyes Station, a town that hasn’t changed a bit since Philip K. Dick lived here in the early 1960s. One of the big questions Dick explored in his novels and short stories was ‘What is a human being?’ A great admirer of Dick’s work, I’ve tried to explore this question as well, while adding my own variations: if someone decides that he’s no longer human, what does he do then? What does he become?

These were the second, third and fourth questions.

In the smallest of nutshells, Chrysalis is my attempt at an answer. It is not the first, nor it will be the last.

Thanks for coming with me today. And since we’re already out here, how about some lunch? I know a great oyster place just up the road.