This month, Futures in Nature Physics sees the welcome return of Alvaro Zinos-Amaro with his story The black hole and the entropy collector. Thus far, as well as coffee, Alvaro has written Futures tales about mysterious shops and the perils of cryogenics. This time he takes on, as the title suggests, a black hole. When he’s not lurking at the event horizon, details of what Alvaro is up to can be found at his blog. Here he reveals the inspiration for his latest story.

Writing The black hole and the entropy collector

I’m blaming Alex Shvartsman for this one.

I came up with this story’s premise when I was casting about  for humorous ideas for Alex’s UFO anthology series. As sometimes happens, though, my first stab at turning the idea into a story didn’t quite work — my original draft was much longer than the story’s current version, and featured a third character and related subplot, neither of which fully gelled.

Once I realized the issue, I removed the extraneous character, trimming down the wordcount significantly, and everything else fell into place. What remained, and was now visible without obstruction, was my initial core concept, a far-out physics retelling of one my favourite fables, The scorpion and the frog.  Since Alex had introduced me to Nature Futures and our collaboration, Coffee in end times, had been published here, it seemed only fitting that the new story should land at Nature and complete the cycle.

Note: I like to place little ‘Easter eggs’ in my stories, and this one seems to have been loaded up with more than the usual share, including a reference to Seinfeld, one to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and two to stand-up comedian George Carlin.