Futures gets off to a flying start in 2015, with the story Passersby by George Zebrowski in Nature Physics. George is no stranger to Futures — indeed he’s no stranger to the world of science fiction, having written a huge number of novels and stories. You can find all of his work at Gollanz’s SF Gateway and at Open Road Media. George very kindly offered to explain what inspired him to write Passersby and in doing so he helps to underscore the Futures philosophy that flash fiction is an important part of the SF galaxy.

Writing Passersby

There is something of a tradition in science fiction for the ‘short short’. Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and others have written these, and a few are quite well known in magazines and in anthologies. Nature is the only regular outlet for this form, which is suited to the science oriented or humorous forms of wit.  It is much harder to do than most imagine to write a short story that requires a careful reading. Read too fast and you slip through, missing it; reread and you might see it, and maybe much more.

I’m grateful that Nature has opened this way to ideas that might not exist as naturally in other forms. I find myself thinking in this way, and don’t know how to stop it.

It’s that time of year. Over at Nature, we’ve been looking back over 2014 as we gear up for the Christmas festivities. At Futures, we try to look forwards, and so this week’s story is a futuristic tale with a seasonal twist. The chains of plenty is written by S R Algernon, who has appeared several times in the Futures section, first with his tale A time for peace and more recently with both Planetary defences and Cargo cult. His story A pocket full of phlogiston appears in the Futures 2 anthology, which (on a seasonal note) would make a wonderful Christmas present. As is rapidly becoming traditional, I’m pleased to say that we have a guest post explaining how Marley and Scrooge ended up in a Futures story…

Writing The chains of plenty

The inspirations for The chains of plenty were some of the pundits that I encountered on TV and the Internet after the 2008–09 financial crash. I saw echoes of Scrooge-like sentiments — that the poor ought to work harder, that they ought to fight with each other for scarce jobs, and that they were less entitled to the benefits of society than people who traded commodities for a living. Some of these exhortations seemed like parables or sermons in their simplicity. There seemed to be no shortage of institutions or people to blame for economic problems, much as it was in Dickens’s day. Despite our vast gains in productivity, technical knowledge and standard of living, we seemed to be just as much in need of Scrooge’s three spirits. My initial aim in writing the story was to carry the Scrooge narrative into a high-tech world to see if it offered a new perspective.

As I updated the characters, I noticed that the three spirits are already with us on our smartphones. We meticulously archive our pasts. We shop online for a bounty of products that would have awed any Victorian. We connect with our neighbours in real time. Our computers predict our futures, completing our sentences, recommending products and warning of dangers. The three spirits are benevolent and bound to our service, for the most part. Still, in all strata of society, people want a bigger share of the pie and, furthermore, a reason why they are justified in getting it. It seemed to come back to Ignorance and Want, the human miseries singled out by Dickens for special mention. Our increases in productivity over the past two centuries had not made us content, and all our accumulated knowledge had not kept us from searching for simple (even, at times, simplistic) explanations for our discontent.

It occurred to me that humans are not psychologically well equipped to accept a free lunch, sometimes for themselves, but especially when they see one given to others. Even when food, shelter, knowledge and art are plentiful and easy to create, it often strikes us as unnatural for these things to be given away. Someone must benefit, even if that person, like Scrooge, is only nominally connected to production. Ideologies come and go, providing different explanations for who is entitled to what. We could face a paradox where we have the power to create everything we might want and yet feel worse off than Tiny Tim. We could attain the knowledge of how to distribute goods efficiently but reject that knowledge in favour of a system that aligns with our moral instincts. Ignorance and want, it seems, are not just hardships of the poor but are also psychological tormentors of the wealthy.

This led me to a different perspective on A Christmas carol and the spirit of Christmas in general. The visitations seemed not a punitive effort to castigate Scrooge for his greed but instead as a well-intentioned attempt to prepare him for paradise. Tiny Tim, in contrast, can enter heaven not as a reward for the suffering he endured but instead because his suffering trained him to be content with very few material comforts. The Ebenezer Scrooge that wakes up on Christmas morning isn’t redeemed because he has become self-sacrificing or penitent. Instead, he learned to enjoy the company of others and (paradoxically) he became generous because he stopped caring so much about how much or how little the poor were entitled to.

Marley, with his perhaps Christ-like suffering, seemed key to this process. In order for Scrooge to feel entitled to his free lunch (i.e., to stop worrying and let himself enjoy parlour games with his nephew and so forth), he needed to feel that it was earned. By proving himself more virtuous and wiser than Marley, Scrooge could feel that he deserved to enjoy the riches around him. The knowledge that he had avoided Marley’s fate cured him of the need to explain his life through Malthusian ideology.

For now, the notion of heaven or paradise is, as it was in Dickens’s day, an idealized abstraction. However, since that time, we have turned many spiritual, mythical or fairy-tale concepts into physical realities. It might not be too much longer (on a historical timescale) before an all-but-eternal life of pleasure is free for the taking. The question is, will we accept it, and might we not benefit from someone like Jacob Marley to nudge us towards it?

This week’s Futures story marks the debut in the section for Rachel Reddick. She took some time out to explain what inspired her to write Missed message.

Writing Missed message

Missed Message is derived from what I consider to be the most tragic possible resolution to the Fermi paradox.

The Fermi paradox asks, essentially, if there are technologically intelligent aliens, where are they?  Why haven’t we heard their radio transmissions?

There are a lot of possible answers, but I wanted to explore what I consider the scariest: intelligent life tends to self-destruct.  In that case, it’s not that life is rare, or intelligence is rare, or that there’s some external civilization-destroying force we humans could potentially hope to fight against.  If a world goes down, the people on it did it to themselves.

Someone waiting for the end on such a world might have a chance to send a message out from a large radio transmitter, such as the ones at Arecibo or Goldstone that are more commonly used for performing radar observations of asteroids.  That unlucky, short-term survivor of a swift disaster wouldn’t have a lot of time.

All that person could do is throw a radio time-capsule into the void, and hope that someone out there picks it up.

And wouldn’t it be awful if we had a chance to catch that message and missed it?  This is another possible side of the Fermi paradox puzzle: we may have overlooked signals.  We’re less likely to be looking in the right direction at the right time to see a message that doesn’t last.  For something like the message in the story, receiving a small fraction of a single transmission isn’t enough to be sure if the signal is spurious, or whether or not it is artificial.

The real life Wow! signal picked up in 1977 is an example.  It was never seen again, and its origin is still unknown.  That sense of uncertainty is what drives the story’s end — what might we have missed?

This month’s Futures story in Nature Physics is A brief history of human intelligence by Jeremy R Butler. Jeremy first appeared in Futures with his tale No fury like a woman cold-called, a rare piece for Futures in that it was all written as dialogue. Here Jeremy takes some time out to explain what inspired his latest story.

Writing A brief history of human intelligence

There must be cardiologists that daydream about seven-chambered hearts, or orthopaedic surgeons that long to set a fractured carapace instead of a femur. As a psychiatrist, there are many days I would love to ply my trade on something other than humans.

A brief history of human intelligence takes that wish to the extreme — consciousness and thought existing anywhere and everywhere. A universe of potential friends and philosophers and creators. What could be better? Or perhaps, worse?

The story is my homage to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the funniest book ever written. I indulged my wackiest ideas the way I imagined Douglas Adams did 35 years ago. It was all plain silliness.

That was, until three weeks ago. When Rosetta and its probe Philae approached comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, headlines declared it: Comets Sing! Suddenly a tarantella is not so far off. 

Perhaps there is a little bit of prescience in this piece.

And if that’s the case, then we are doomed.

This week’s Futures tale is Reversal of misfortune by J W Armstrong, the second of his stories to appear in Futures (the first, A final problem, was published under the pen name A C Doyle). The origins for both these stories are explored in this blog post.

Writing Reversal of misfortune

I was an ardent science-fiction fan as a boy, reasonably knowledgeable about the canon up to my mid-teenage years.  But then it was college/grad school/family/work and I fell behind on my reading.  However, during this time — and often inspired by events at work — SF story ideas, independent at least and original I think, occasionally suggested themselves.  I sometimes wrote these down as story fragments.  I was happy with a few and flirted with developing them and submitting for publication.  But I was busy and, in any case, I figured there was always time to do this tomorrow.

You might be wondering:  “What does any of this have to do with Reversal of misfortune”?  The connection is this:  two years ago I had a stroke, with many of the usual stroke-related problems (however, happily, speech and cognition appeared unaffected).  I had excellent care, I worked hard at rehabilitation, and after nine months my doctors declared me as good as new.

Except, of course, for the residual effects.  The relevant one for Reversal of misfortune is that, post-stroke, I have vivid and dark SF-related dreams — dreams that draw both on classical SF themes and on my own ideas and fragments from previous years.  I took to keeping a pad of paper next to my bed and writing, when I awoke, a summary of each dream — thinking this information might be useful for my neurologist (it wasn’t).  Some are disconnected, gruesome dream-stuff — the sorts of dreams that, had you admitted to them, might have got you burned at the stake in an earlier era.  Some have been ideas requiring a longish backstory or extensive character development to make a coherent story.  A few were basically a single idea.

For these, instead of scribbling a summary, I went to the word processor and wrote the dream down (typically at 4 a.m., in a white heat) before I forgot it.  These stories involve technical ideas (quantum mechanics, probability, artificial intelligence, time travel) the nuances of which, at least, might be unfamiliar to a general reader.  I thought they might be candidates for Futures, though — the backgrounds of Nature and Nature Physics readers meant I would not have to expend words, precious in a one-page piece, explaining things.  (Additionally — disclosure here — I’ve published several Letters in Nature and I figured it would be a big ego trip to publish also in Futures.)

So I submitted and two have been accepted.  The first was a Sherlock Holmes/quantum physics piece, A final problem, written, for obvious reasons, under the pen name “A. C. Doyle”.  The present Reversal of misfortune is a what-if commentary involving the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.  In both cases these came from stroke-stoked dreams and were written very quickly.  I was delighted at each acceptance!

Of course, I don’t wish medical problems on anyone; in particular, I really wish that I had not had that stroke.  The marginal upside has been an apparent organization of subconscious ideas — and the intimation of mortality that pushed me to take action on them.