Published today, Ice and white roses is Rebecca’s second story for Futures  — her first, Are you receiving?, appeared earlier this year. Rebecca has kindly agreed to offer a glimpse into the creative process behind this week’s story. You can read more about her work at her website and, as this blog post contains spoilers, you should read the story first …

Writing Ice and white roses

As a writer, I love challenges.  When I wrote Ice and white roses, I gave myself the challenge to write a story that begins and ends with the same phrase.  I don’t know what part of me decided that phrase would be “I always preferred white roses”, but once it was on the page, I was faced with a conundrum.  Why would a preference for white roses be important, and what could be the reason for it to come around again at the end?  After some thought, it seemed that a good explanation would be if the person saying the phrase could not remember that she’d already said it.

Once I realized that I was writing about a character suffering from dementia, it suddenly became a lot more personal.  I myself struggle with poor memory.  For example, apparently I rode the bus to high school during my senior year.  I have no memory of riding the bus, or even the existence of the bus, but my mother tells me that it happened, and I believe her.  Often, friends or family will say, “Do you remember when …” and I get a sinking sensation, knowing there’s a high likelihood that I simply don’t.

The possibility of this getting worse, of losing even more of what has come before, is a very real fear for me, so putting myself inside the head of a character who has gone down that path was unsettling at best.

As I explored the reason why white roses were so important to this character, I discovered the deeper story and those bits of memory that have not disappeared — the husband, lost in space; the child who grew up fatherless; the narrator’s unswerving certainty that her husband will some day return — all of it crystallized in the bouquet of frozen white roses.

This week’s Futures tale is When the music ends by Philip Ball. Remarkably, given Phil’s long-standing association with Nature, this is the first Futures story he’s penned for us — and it’s very nice to welcome him to the foild. Phil kindly took some time out to explain what inspired his story. You can find out more about Phil’s actiovites at his website.

Writing When the music stops

There’s a long history of attempts to create music by some kind of automated or algorithmic procedure, going back at least to Mozart’s dice-determined assembly of musical fragments (Musikalisches Würfelspiel). The advent of modern computers obviously broadened the possibilities considerably, but aside from compositions tightly constrained by prevailing harmonic and stylistic rules (for example, Baroque chorales — K. Ebcioglu J. Logic Programming 8, 145-185; 1990), the results have tended to be unconvincing: lacking in inspiration at best, bland and formulaic pastiche at worst (J. A. Biles https://www.it.rit.edu/~jab/GenJam94/Paper.html and L Spector & A. Alpern in Proceedings of the Twelfth National conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-94, pp.3–8. AAAI Press/MIT Press; 1994). Computers can come up with endless variety, but it is hard to identify reliable criteria for automating the process of deciding which variants are worth pursuing and developing. In short, computers are even worse judges of their own work than we are of ours.

And this is where I felt things stood, until in 2012 I came across Iamus — a computer developed by researchers at the University of Malaga in Spain that composes in a modern, often atonal classical style. It uses an evolutionary algorithm that takes a small musical fragment, itself generated by the computer, and mutates it according to various rules so as to unfold a fully fledged composition. Or rather, endless variations of them. Somehow the Malaga team, led by computer scientist Francisco Vico, has found a scheme that enables Iamus’s work to evolve towards forms that sound not only plausible but interesting and fulfilling. Opinions about Iamus’s oeuvre vary, as they do about any kind of music. But the results — some of them chamber works, others full orchestral scores, delivered straight from the computer as playable manuscript without human intervention — have been deemed good enough to be recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra for release as a CD. Personally, I quite like it, in moderation. The LSO’s chairman Lennox Mackenzie offered cautious encouragement: the music “went nowhere”, he said, but “it does have something.”

After I had corresponded with Francisco for some time, he invited me to Malaga in July to speak at a short meeting on the future of computer music. Having written a book about the cognition of music, I suggested that it should be possible in principle to identify some of the musical structures that excite human emotion and to build these into the selection criteria used by systems like Iamus for composing. I said at the conference that I’d be persuaded that the age of automated composition had really arrived when I hear computer-generated music that makes me cry. And I would not be surprised to see that happen.

On the trip home I thought over the implications. If we really can understand in an objective way why people respond emotionally to music — and this does seem to be possible to some degree — then there is no obvious reason why “emotionality” shouldn’t be an ingredient of computer music, to be adjusted by a dial just as we might alter the tempo or instrumentation. But what if we solve that problem too well? Francisco is sure that systems like Iamus can take us into areas of musical space that we haven’t even discovered yet. What if one of them is a hyper-emotional domain beyond anything previously composed?

So I sketched out my thoughts for this story on the plane back to London. Bach’s music has always been capable of bringing tears to my eyes, but it was shortly after my return that I stumbled across Purcell’s ‘When I Am Laid in Earth’ from his opera Dido and Aeneas, which still leaves me helpless. Imagine this emotional intensity cranked up tenfold — or a hundredfold! — by algorithmic means. What would it do to us? And yet the thought that this music should ever be banished forever from our ears is no less unbearable.

After that, the story wrote itself.

I should probably add that I don’t seriously think what Francisco and his colleagues are doing is going to hasten the end of civilization. It seems most likely that Iamus and its progeny will be valuable aids to composers – as well as perhaps giving us a superior class of muzak. The story is really about this extraordinary capacity music has to elicit an emotional response, and how helpless we are to resist its poignant charms. And that is something, of course, to celebrate, not to fear.

This week’s sci-fi tale from Futures is the time-travelling, loop-inducing Möbius by J W Alden. The story is the author’s debut Futures appearance, but he kindly took time out to explain what inspired the tale. You can catch up on his other activities at his website. Please note this guest post contains spoilers, so read the story first!

Writing Möbius

Within the Sanskrit epic of ancient India, the Mahabharata, is the story of a king named Kakudmi, who seeks the counsel of the Hindu god Brahma to decide who should have his daughter’s hand in marriage. He waits patiently to gain an audience with the deity, only to find that time passes very differently on Brahma’s plane — millions of years have passed on Earth while he waited. His daughter’s suitors have long passed away. There’s a similar story in the Jewish Talmud. Honi ha-M’agel sleeps for 70 years and wakes to find that no one will believe he is who he says he is (written around 1,800 years prior to the publication of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle). There are more stories like these in the Buddhist Pāli Canon, the Islamic Quran, and the Japanese Nihon Shoki. In other words, we’ve been fascinated by time travel for a very long time.

For me, it’s been about 23 years, which is most of my life. Back to the Future led to A Sound of Thunder, which led to The Time Machine, which led to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In a way, I suppose I was traveling back in time myself as I moved from one story to the next. When I grew old enough to know I wanted to start making up tales of my own, I knew one day I’d get around to writing a time travel story. Möbius is it.

In many ways, Möbius is about the decade of my life I spent working in a dusty retail warehouse. I would trudge to this job every night (it was the graveyard shift) and perform the same menial tasks over and over again. These nights blurred together as though part of some miserably repeating loop, and the longer it repeated, the more trapped I felt. Outside the job, life went on: I met my future wife, made a home in South Florida, and began to write. But the gradual change in perspective that comes with growing up did little to distract me from the loop; it only intensified the feeling that I was wasting years of my life on a solitary track to nowhere.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to step in front of a van to free myself of that particular möbius. All I had to do was quit my job. And as miserable as those years were, I suppose I ought to be thankful for them. After all, they got me into Futures.

If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. One of the premises for the new film Interstellar is a near-future Earth ravaged by drought and famine (and if Futures had a galactic credit for every time such a dystopia crosses the desk, well…). Setting aside the nagging worry that a future of happy, well-fed people living in a well-balanced climate never seems to cut the mustard, what makes this film special is the science.

Contrary to popular belief, moviemakers usually do make an attempt to have  their most fantastical ideas rooted in a degree of reality (that even extends to animation, witness the advice received for Finding Nemo). True, they will sometimes register the boundaries of real science and then blissfully go ahead and break the rules anyway — but at least the complaints department gets to be forewarned.

But Hollywood has a lot more to offer than great movie mistakes and a sense that time travel would never work like that (I mean, a DeLorean!!). As John Hurwitz noted in his Futures story The method last month, there is the potential for serious scientific payback. And in a moment of life imitating art, there is more than a nugget of truth in that tale. As Kip Thorne reveals in an exclusive Q&A in this week’s Nature and in the extended podcast interview with Zeeya Meralli below (from the Nature Podcast team ), Interstellar gave as much as it took.

Thorne, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, was an adviser and executive producer on Interstellar, giving director Christopher Nolan not only the original idea for the film but also insight into black holes and wormholes. But Thorne got an unexpected bonus. In helping with the visualization of black holes, he found that the special effects offered unparalleled modelling power. That revealed fresh insights into gravitational lensing — insights that are publishable as scientific papers.

It’s not every movie that can lay claim to a place in the scientific literature — I’m still waiting for the spin-off paper from The Creature from the Black Lagoon. (Rumours that Godzilla has submitted a paper on radical urban planning among kaiju could not be confirmed at the time of publishing.) But this positive outcome from Interstellar suggests that there may be more that Hollywood bucks could offer cash-strapped scientists. Perhaps there’s a better way to fund the next particle accelerator after all — time to dust off those script proposals …

Marissa Lingen has made several appearances in Futures, the first being the story ‘Alloy’ back in 2007. Since then, she has wrestled with artificial intelligence, made a bid for world domination, explored quantum entanglement, set an exam on time travel and met with Maxwell’s Demon. Her story ‘The stuff we don’t do’ features in the Futures 2 e-book anthology. You can find out more about Marissa’s work on her website. This week sees her dipping her toes in ‘Boundary waters’ for her Futures story, and she kindly took some time to explain what inspired her to write this tale.

 Writing ‘Boundary waters’

I’m the sort of person who thinks that January is the perfect time to head north. When I wrote this story in January along the shores of Lake Superior, it never got above 0 ºF.  (That’s about –18 ºC for the rest of the world’s temperature scale.)  I love it up there any time of year, but January is amazing, with the walls of mist as the lake freezes out from the shore at night, the cracking as some of it melts a bit, and otherwise quiet.  One person’s idea of an idyllic place to write is another’s frozen wasteland.  So I already had that disconnect in tastes in my mind when I was there, and then I went past a building labelled ‘limnology’.  I like words I don’t know, especially -ologies, and it turns out limnology is the study of fresh water.  My eyes lit.  That’s for me, I thought.  Then: no, not me, someone else unexpected.  Someone else who always has to explain what she likes, if she can even explain it at all.  And ‘Boundary waters’ was born.

The Futures story in this month’s Nature Physics is ‘Alienated’ by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. Sylvia has written for Futures before — ‘A long way from home’ appeared earlier this year, and her story ‘The front line’ features in the Futures 2 e-book anthology. You can find out more about her work at her website. Here she explores the inspiration behind her latest tale:

Writing Alienated

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably Doctor Who. What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe. — Terry Pratchett

I have been doing my best to write stories for Natures’ Futures series for two years now and I’m thrilled every time I have a story accepted. I have always loved to write about other worlds, ranging from banshees in our sewer system and dragons in our forest to rockets heading for the far reaches of space. My favourite challenge, though, is to write about our future within our own world. When I first started thinking about ‘Alienated’, I was thinking about space colonization. I grew up in the American West and so the idea of the frontier and encountering the residents (and painfully misunderstanding them) is very familiar to me.  A lot of science fiction is about space teams and government organizations and organized events and military. Whereas when I look at exploration on Earth, it’s been about solving a problem: a need for land, a way to distract problem people, a place to ship undesirables. I imagine after the initial age of discovery, the key to exploration will be commercial systems looking to solve immediate problems and make a profit.

The question for me then becomes: who are these people who will travel great distances for a harsh life on a world upon which they know nothing, when they can almost certainly never return. I’ve come up with a couple of answers to this question, none of them pretty.

So that’s how I started thinking about a penal colony set up in the clouds on Venus meant to keep a group of undesirables out of the way. That swiftly got complicated and I realized that I was too close to home — any change on Venus would draw a lot of scientific attention. In order to save the story, I pushed it farther away, both in terms of timescale and distance. I imagined the space age of discovery had finished and a more practical view of far-off worlds had reached us. The people funding the travel, those with commercial interests, would be focused on setting up the colony as cheaply and efficiently as possible. The only people with time to spare, to watch the environment and see what changes, would be those dragged out against their will.

Combine that with an unstable prison population and I had a story.

Adding detail is always a dangerous thing; I planted this firmly into our world with the Barbie doll because I can’t quite imagine a future without them. Purple fingerling potatoes are just such an incongruously weird thing to be planting as a starting point on a world far away from ours, it captured my imagination immediately. The schnapps, well, there’s a lot of alcohol in my stories; my characters have a tendency to drink to forget. I think, that’s an aspect of being in the middle of a fast-moving emotional world of a story, the narrator can be forgiven for wanting to escape.

And then there’s the xenobiology, or lack thereof.  I’ll hold my hands up there: it’s difficult to imagine how intelligent life could manifest on a faraway planet. A science-fiction writer can no longer rely on heavily made-up Star Trek aliens who were always recognizably human. Today’s story telling takes into account the diversity and breadth of possibilities that we have learned while we still only peek at outer space. That’s not to say that I think bright green gaseous life forms exist, let alone that they would likely populate future penal colonies without anyone noticing. But it was fun to imagine how these could exist so completely separately to us, with no means of communication.

My story relies more on imagination and every-day people than predictions of the future but then, so does Doctor Who, so at least I’m in good company.