Futures is pleased to welcome back J. W. Armstrong this week, with his story The preprint. Regular readers will remember his previous stories The sixth circle and Reversal of misfortune, though they might not have realized that A final problem by one A. C. Doyle was actually by the same author. Here, he reveals the creative process behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The preprint

The original draft of The preprint was written quickly, in the very early morning, and had a different ending. In that initial version, the machine reluctantly decides that the protagonist knows too much. The machine concludes it’s in the Universe’s best interest for the protagonist to die, thus assuring the equations will never be published. Before killing him, though, the machine gives the protagonist 60 seconds for any religious or philosophical rituals that might be deemed important.

So the last part of the story, in its original drafting, was about: you’re not in physical pain, your cognition is not impaired, and you’re absolutely certain you have only 1 minute to live — what might your final thoughts be?

At the time I wrote it (3 a.m.), I thought it was pretty good stuff. When I re-read the story later, however, the ending was so depressing and pretentious that even I — as the author, predisposed to like the prose — couldn’t stand it. I highlighted the story’s ending in my word processor, hit ‘delete’, and saved the first part in my ‘ideas’ folder. I then forgot about it.

A few weeks later a chance discussion with a friend about publication and academic promotion reminded me of that first draft and catalysed a better ending. I rewrote the story quickly. I liked that subsequent draft — except it was overlong. Backstory elements about the machine (appearance, motivations, role in the Universe’s workings, downsides of causality violation) were deleted. At one point I sent a version to my brother, who had helpful comments. I worked on shortening it some more. When the story got down to 950 words I submitted it to Futures. I was, of course, delighted when it was accepted!

Finally, I struggled with the title. The time machine was an early, unimaginative, candidate. Publish and perish was a working title at one point. Briefly, Perish and publish appealed to me. I finally struck on The preprint as descriptive without, I hoped, telegraphing the ending.