This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Andrea Kriz to the section with her story Chrysalis. Andrea is a PhD student at Harvard and won the 2015 Ilona Karmel Prize for Writing Science Fiction. Here, she kindly offers an insight into what inspired her tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Chrysalis

Every week I get my copy of Nature in the mail, flip to the back, and read Futures on the way up in my apartment building’s (freakishly slow) elevator. I think that exposure in general is what motivated me to start writing flash fiction. But one story, I believe in one of last spring’s issues, especially stuck with me. It was about a bakery in space and people coming in and reminiscing about Earth, which had been destroyed, and I remember seriously wondering: what would it be like to lose and forget your home, forget your city — forget your entire planet? It felt like being punched in the gut. That kind of feeling came back when I was writing Chrysalis. 

Another inspiration was the mecha anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Mainly a quote from one of the last episodes: “[Humanity] will utilize that which they hate most of all in order to survive.” At first I thought the story wasn’t going to work because who could be stupid enough to mistake an alien life form for a pilotable robot? But then I thought: couldn’t someone build organic machines that evolve like the real thing? And then wouldn’t evolving to utilize their pilots as a fuel source become the next logical step? No? Just me? Okay.