Futures author Preston Grassmann gives a preview of  Hal-Con 2015

My first experience with Hal-Con Japan was back in 2012, when I interviewed Alastair Reynolds and covered the convention for the June issue of Locus Magazine. If you’ve read my articles on this event in various venues, you might remember that the stated goal of the convention was to encourage dialogue between international and Japanese fans. In the past few years, with the help of guests such as Joe Haldeman and Peter Watts, I’m glad to announce that Hal-Con has begun to achieve its stated goal.

On April 11th and 12th of 2015, internationally acclaimed writer Hannu Rajaniemi and comic artist Noriko Nagano will be the guests of honour. I’ll be reprising my role as one of the interviewers, along with Andrew Adams and Regina Glei. A variety of panel discussions are being planned, with topics ranging from surveillance in fact and fiction to writing fiction in a non-native tongue. As in previous years, there will be parallel programming for fantasy and young adult fiction (a track increasingly marked out with glitter and sighs – see Meyer), which should appeal to a broad range of readers. For those who have never attended a science-fiction convention in Japan, the only thing you can expect is a veritable cornucopia of subjects and ideas. There are no maps for the territory of fandom in Japan and Hal-Con is certainly no exception. But for those who yearn for a more bibliophilic approach, with a more intimate gathering, this is a convention you won’t want to miss.

More information on Hal-Con can be found at www.hal-con.net.

Money is at the heart of this week’s Futures story. Good for something comes from the keyboard of Deborah Walker, who has graced the pages of Futures multiple times (see the list at the foot of this post) and whose story Glass future can be found in the Futures 2 e-book anthology. You can catch up with Deborah’s latest activities on her blog. Here, she reveals the unexpected twists that led her to write Good for something. As ever, this post contains spoilers, so please read the story first.

Writing Good for something

Last year, my writing friend and fellow Nature Futures author, Gareth D. Jones invited me to take part in a collaborative story project. I said: Yes, please. I’d worked on one of Gareth’s collaborative stories before. Collaborations can work in different ways, but with Gareth I hardly had to do any work. All he wanted was short vignette from me about a character, any character walking along the corridor of Astropolis orbital station. (You can read Gareth’s Astropolis story Travel by numbers in Nature Futures.)

I’d supply a short vignette, a memorable character sketch, and Gareth would do all the hard work putting it into a story frame alongside the vignettes from several other authors. Little work and a big payoff is a rare event in this writing malarkey, so I got to work.

Quickly, well quickly for me, the story unfolded. Why would a character be on a station? I’d recently done some research on the study of currency, numismatics. My main character became a coin collector and more than that — a thief. Numismatics gave me a perfect world building opportunity to reveal some future history. Coins and other currency are snapshots of a culture. I had my character, Raoul; I had a life for him and motivation: Raoul was a man obsessed with completing his collection. So far so good. As Raoul continued walking, the story of his life unfolded, and more characters emerged. I had a beginning, a middle and an end to the story. What I didn’t have was a vignette.  Good for something was a proper story, complete in itself. It was no good for Gareth who wouldn’t be able to fit it into his collaborative frame story. Maybe it was good for Nature Futures? I changed the station name to High Jova, did some more editing and sent it.

And then started another vignette about a character walking along Astropolis station.

And, yes, I did it again. That second vignette turned into a story, too.

How very annoying.

But third time’s the charm, and I did manage a vignette for Gareth.

And I also realized that character x walking along a corridor on an orbital station is a very good story prompt for me.

Other Futures stories by Deborah Walker

Face in the dark |  Sybil | Surrendered human | First foot | Ovoids | Green future | The frozen hive of her mind | Auntie Merkel

This week Iulia Georgescu from Nature Physics — which, along with Nature, plays host to Futures stories — offers a dystopian view in her tale The last one. Having recovered from her (hopefully fictitious) midnight raid on the Science Museum, she explains what inspired her to write the story. WARNING: this post contains spoilers, so read the story first!

Writing The last one

Growing up in communist Romania in the 1980s meant that things many children take for granted were luxury items for me: Coke, chewing-gum, even bananas. So it will probably not come as a surprise to learn that as a kid I never actually saw a helium balloon, let alone owned one. In fact, I got my first one only quite recently — well, actually, my baby son did.

I was on a mums’ day out with a friend and our little ones got helium balloons for free at a restaurant. Despite the age gap, both my son and I were equally delighted. We tied the balloon securely to the pram. My friend’s son soon managed to untie his balloon and as we all watched it float up into the sky, my friend said: “Did you know that if they were to price these balloons in line with the helium reserves we have left, they would probably cost around $100?”

I didn’t know that — but I did know that we are running out of helium. We had an article on the issue in Nature Physics last July.

“Isn’t it a shame,” my friend said, “that we are wasting helium on balloons?”

With that in mind, I returned home carefully transporting the balloon on the Tube — the precious prize of the day. On my daily commute the next day, the story was readily forming in my head. It kind of wrote itself.

Many of us are now fortunate enough to live in an age of plenty, and we forget how wonderful and precious little things are. We fail to appreciate the true value of the objects around us. For me, the dystopian future in the story is not completely imaginary. I remember my country at the end of the 1980s: a nation where food was distributed in rations based on ID cards; a place of dark cities with huge empty shops. As children, we would save the aluminium foil from chocolate bars and any polystyrene we could get our hands on and use them to make toys.

This story is a memory of a future that no one should have to live.

It is rare that an instruction manual appears in Futures, but this week we have been sent information that is so important for all of you who have purchased a quantum disambiguator that we really needed to get it out there. And fast. If you are thinking about using your new toy,  you really do need to read How to configure your quantum disambiguator, as failure to do so could have difficult and dangerous consequences. We are indebted to author Stewart C Baker for bringing this important information to our attention and for his detailed explanation of how he found it. You might wish to review the published text before reading the additional information below:

Writing How to configure your quantum disambiguator

The author, according to Roland Barthes, is dead, and writing is more a matter of multiple, conflicting sources coalescing in the mind of each reader than it is of any individual genius.

As an author myself, I am happy to report that the rumours of our collective death are exaggerated.  On the other hand, the idea of multiple, conflicting texts appeals to me.  I’ve always been drawn to stories like Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs found in a Bathtub, and the surreal, absurdist existentialism of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle.  To stories that build themselves up and tear themselves apart at the same time, and that peel back the essential strangeness of this thing we call reality.

For How to configure your quantum disambiguator, I wanted to see if I could reach that Kafkaesque space while making people laugh — or at least chuckle.

The inspirations of the story are definitely multiple, and they definitely conflict.  Here are just a handful:

• An American cartoon from the 1990s called Ren and Stimpy, which was definitely not intended for children.  In one episode (“Space Madness”), there is a big, shiny red button called the ‘History Eraser Button’, which does about what you’d expect.  The narrator spends about two minutes describing how dangerous it is, and how shiny it is, and how lovely it might feel if one were to push it, with results that are not too surprising.

• Popular conceptions of the many-worlds interpretation.  Goatee-wearing evil twins and all.

• Exquisitely murky technical writing.  As a writer, I take a sort of perverse enjoyment out of manuals that seem to contradict one another and that were apparently written section by section and then smashed together to form a not-too-coherent whole.  It takes a special kind of skill, I think, to make a document that’s supposed to be helpful into something that’s more frustrating than no instructions at all.

• Wikipedia, specifically for the ‘disambiguation’ concept.  And, of course, for the idea that a text might not be quite as authentic as it claims, and might have been altered by people with an axe to grind.

Regardless of how my sources coalesce in your mind, I hope you enjoy How to configure your quantum disambiguator.  And do please mind the button.  Although … maybe a little push wouldn’t hurt?   Just a tiny one?

Low-city life, this month’s Futures tale in Nature Physics, sees the return of David G Blake. David’s first Futures story, To my father, appeared in the Futures 2 e-book anthology, and his story A kite for Sarah was published in Futures last year. You can learn more about David’s activities at his Facebook page. David very kindly agreed to explain what inspired his venture into simulated reality (warning, contains spoilers, so read the story first):

Writing Low-city life

My interest in simulated reality started with the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation. You could go anywhere and do — be — anything.  The most memorable examples of that for me were the Moriarty episodes “Elementary, Dear Data” and “Ship in a Bottle” and later the episode “Descent” in which Data plays poker with Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton.  There were better episodes, of course, but those touched on that limitless quality to the whole concept.

It continued from there into MMOs. The Realm Online, Ultima Online, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Eve Online, Star Wars Galaxies and The Secret World to name a few.  They all took that feeling of going anywhere and doing anything, and ran as far as they could with it.  If I learned anything from playing MMOs, it’s that virtual-reality games will be extremely addictive, everything you love about them will be cut days before release, you won’t be able to log on for the first two weeks, and you’ll have to remind yourself to search what’s left of that mutant bunny rabbit you just crushed for coins or, if you’re lucky, a fresh pair of boots.  Somehow, it’ll still be a blast.

That brings us to literature.  I’ve read and enjoyed far too many novels and short stories dealing with simulated reality to list them all, so I’ll just mention my most recent favorite:  Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.  It’s after reading it that I realized my interest in simulated reality had turned into an urge to explore the concept for myself, to make it my own in some small way.

In Low-city life, Terra takes no notice of other people at street level or of the high-city traffic until the vendor brings that into her reality.  On the walk home, she doesn’t notice the people avoiding her as she crosses the street cramming the hot dog in her mouth or the neighbour in the yard watching her get sick.  When her brother activates the grid to find her, only her location is glowing, and she doesn’t consider that he might’ve filtered the results to match her genetic profile.  None of this registers on a conscious level, but it feeds Terra’s fear all the same, which profoundly affects the nature of her epiphany at the end.  When writing flash, you have so few words to work with that the story you tell by what you don’t show becomes even more important than normal, especially if you want to utilize those limits to help explore the limitless.