This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Wendy Nikel, with her story Lava cake for the Apocalypse. Regular readers will remember Wendy’s previous stories The Memory Ward and Let me sleep when I die. You can find out more about Wendy’s work — and her latest novella The Continuum — at her website and by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the culinary inspiration for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Lava cake for the Apocalypse

For the past few years, I’ve been participating in an annual flash-fiction writing contest on Codex Writers Group. Each weekend, we receive various prompts that we’re to use as our inspiration for a new flash piece. This particular week, I was mulling over a couple prompts, but one in particular really got me thinking along these lines: ‘society no longer values something that we have’.

It also just so happened that I was baking that weekend. I was baking cupcakes for a guest blog for Beth Cato’s ‘Bready or Not’ feature in celebration of the publication of my time-travel novella, The Continuum. Up to my elbows in flour and frosting, I started putting the two together and writing a story that’s not just about the value of a good recipe, but also about the value of other things: the knowledge passed down from earlier generations, the farmers and labourers who provide us with the things we eat, the places in the world where these ingredients originate, and Earth itself.