This week’s Futures story marks the welcome return of Graham Robert Scott with Last contact. Regular readers will remember Graham’s earlier story for us in the shape of Cold comforts. When not writing short stories, Graham teaches writing at Texas Woman’s University. Here, he reveals the origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Last contact

There’s a second story to be read between the lines of Last contact, told therein through hints. When I started this piece, I hoped to capture in a knuckle of writing a fistful of forecast about how we and other occupants of this Earth might coexist at the end of this century. As a result, whole paragraphs of thought were sometimes conveyed by a word or a phrase.

A case in point: Leo walks to Lagos from where? The distance from places today inhabited by western lowland gorillas to Lagos isn’t really walkable. They’re hundreds of miles — countries — apart. The nearest gorilla species in the wild isn’t the western lowland but the Cross River gorilla, yet it is itself far south of Lagos and closer to extinction than the western lowland. But, just as the threat of climate change sometimes provokes serious conversations about geoengineering, so too does threat of species extinction encourage serious conversations about radical rescue strategies. One such extreme is translocation — moving a critically endangered species to another territory. Like geoengineering, translocation is a solution virtually guaranteed to cascade into new problems, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen, particularly as a changing climate shifts rainfall patterns. Meanwhile, desperation has led many conservationists to embrace species tourism as a way to raise funds that can help animals recover.

Last contact depicts a world where gorilla tourism has helped the western lowland gorilla, but where the rarer, shy Cross River didn’t really have that option. It also assumes that, in the final years of the Cross River gorilla, Nigeria and Cameroon adopted and translocated western lowland gorillas partly to spread them out in the face of unpredictable climate change and partly to draw on western-lowland tourism for Cross River funding. I never did pin down an exact location for Leo’s home, but imagined it being about the same distance from the city as Nigeria’s Lekki Conservation Centre. I did briefly toy around with the idea of having Leo be a Cross River gorilla, and I adore the idea we might still have them around in 80 years. But when it came to writing the story, I just couldn’t force myself to be that optimistic. And so, in the future depicted in Last contact, the Cross River gorilla exists only in memory and video.