This week’s Futures story marks the debut in the section of J J Roth, who presents a tale of lost love in Heartworm. Here she takes time out of her busy schedule to explain what inspired the story. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Heartworm

This story came together out of several divergent threads.

First, like most of my stories these days, this one started as an exercise for a writing class. The exercise called for a first person narrator who starts in a specific, concrete situation and then steps back to make a commentary about a larger societal issue.  I wrote the exercise in the autumn of 2013, soon after Wendy Davis’s dramatic pro-choice/women’s rights filibuster in the Texas state legislature.  The filibuster became national news in the United Sates. Looking back, having that news story in mind probably informed the ‘larger societal issue’ in Heartworm, which morphed into something broader than control over women’s bodies.

Second, I wanted to try writing a cyberpunk-flavoured story because I’m a fan of the genre, and particularly of the human–computer interface that’s often found in cyberpunk stories. In my day job, I work with a number of platform and network security engineers and find their work fascinating. The question of how computing technology can be used, for both noble and nefarious purposes, is something that comes up often in our discussions. A near-future form of that question found its way into this story.

Third, a year after I wrote the writing class exercise, I went to Boston, Massachusetts, for a family event. One afternoon, I took the T (what Bostonians call their underground) out to Cambridge to walk around the Harvard campus for the first time since I was a student.  I realized that I had not yet written a law student character into any of my stories.  In mentally rifling through exercises I might develop into a story with law student characters, I thought of what would later become Heartworm. At the time the characters had no names, and the exercise had no setting — just the passionate desire of a hacker to free his beloved fiancée from a technological prison of her powerful father’s making.  Zora and Peter volunteered as my first two law student characters, which added dimensions to each of their characters I hadn’t anticipated.

One of the things I enjoy as a writer is trying to put new spins on familiar tropes, or trying to turn them on their heads. It was important to me that given the larger commentary about sexual and emotional control over women, the story not reduce to a white knight rescuing a weak woman victim. I thought about reversing the sex and gender roles or other permutations, but in the end, I felt the commentary would be most effective if Zora was the controlled character.  Still, I wanted Zora to display agency. Finding a way to do that was difficult in a flash piece where, for the commentary to be effective, her emotions throughout the story are no longer her own. Her small, private rebellion against her father revealed at the end allowed me to give a glimpse of her character before the controlling algorithm took over her feelings, when she still had the ability to make her own choices.

Tim Cassford makes his debut in Futures this week with his story All, alone. The story tackles isolation — and the possible medical remedy for that situation. Tim is a doctor by day, but he managed to find time between patients to provide an insight into the roots of his tale. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing All, alone

I don’t really remember exactly when or how I came up with the idea for All, alone; I’ve a feeling it’s been simmering away gently somewhere inside of me for some time. I work as a doctor, and throughout my career I have come into contact with many people with mental health problems, from depression to bipolar to schizophrenia, and one of the things that always strikes me is just how isolated people can feel. Life can be hard enough to deal with at the best of times, but I can’t imagine how much harder it is if there’s a voice only you can hear giving a running commentary on what you’re doing, or telling you that you’re worthless. If someone else is giving you a hard time, at least you can try to get away from them. But if you couldn’t get away, what then?

Then I had a thought: what if the voices were a positive thing? What if they were the only positive thing? What if, rather than causing feelings of isolation, they were there to support you, to prop you up when you were down? This was the germ of my story, and the questions that it threw up shaped the rest. Why would we need to hear voices telling us of our worth? What would be so lacking from our society that the void would need filling in such a way? And so isolation became the theme, with undercurrents of paranoia; a heart-warming tale if ever there was one!

This week’s Futures story is Jiffy, by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino. The story takes a look at our Universe from a fresh perspective — a perspective that offers a somewhat disconcerting view. Here George and Charles explain the thought processes behind the tale. As ever you should read the story before diving in.

Writing Jiffy

George Zebrowski: Jiffy emerges from a certain kind of imaginative perversity, an impulse that I am sure many scientists and science-fiction writers feel, that the Universe might be otherwise than the one we know, that perhaps something may go wrong with the vastness in which we swim. I’m reminded of Ernst Mach’s idea that gravity may be due to some large acceleration of the Universe as a whole, or that once it seemed that ships might sail over a vast torrential falls at the Earth’s edge.

Our story refers to the world below our senses, in the microverse, for which we devise measurements useful in our perceptual realm, to suggest a final threat to our existence, to face our human emotions with an inescapable ending that our senses cannot experience even while our intellects comprehend.

Curious, that we can say this much — something but not everything, to recall Richard Feynman’s view of the sciences.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Charles Pellegrino: George started this abstract fantasy of the ‘flicker’, observed down at the quantum level of manifolds and ‘Branes’. Sometimes, when George and I are on the phone or thrown into the same room, it’s like throwing hypergolic propellants together and one never knows where the explosions of scientific speculation will end up. If you read between the lines of Jiffy — a fun thought experiment on the size of things — and if you consider the approach of a universal tragedy rendered directly observable in 11-dimensional space-time, think back again to the old question about the observer influencing the observed.

Futures is delighted this week to welcome Xia Jia to our pages with her story Let’s have a talk. Although she is a multiple winner of the Yinhe and Xingyun Awards for Chinese science fiction, this story marks the first time that she has written completely in English. A writer, filmmaker, actress and artist (among other things), she very kindly took time out of her busy schedule to explain what inspired her to write this tale. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Let’s have a talk

Since the first fairy tale scrawled in a notebook, I have been writing fictional stories in Chinese for more than 20 years. In 2004, I published my first science fiction story The Demon-Enslaving Flask in Science Fiction World, China’s biggest SF magazine. In recent years, some of my stories have been translated into English and published in Clarkesworld and other venues. All of these have exceeded my expectations of 20 years ago.

Let’s have a talk is my first story written in English. It came from a simple idea: if I’m lucky enough, I could be the first Chinese writer who publishes a science fiction story in Nature. That sounded so cool! Then I sat down at my computer and tried to make this dream come true.

When I pursued my PhD in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, I was fascinated with these questions: How can we explore the frontier between worlds? How can we achieve any knowledge of the unknown, as well as the understanding and empathy of the Other? If our languages are created by different social and cultural constructs, how can we possibly have a real talk with strangers? So far we have not figured out any easy answers to these questions.

I embodied this idea in a dramatic situation. Some unknown creatures are speaking an unknown language in a sealed black box: would you dare to knock at the door and say hello?

As I am not a highly skilled English speaker, writing a story in English seemed like jumping into unfamiliar territory without any survival kit, which also requires imagination and courage. I’m so pleased that my adventure succeeded.

Several months ago I complained to my friend Fernando Ran Wei that some dreams can never be realized because of my limited capacity. “Like what?” he asked.

“For example, I can never write science fiction in English!”

“That’s weird. You told me that you believe in your life you would probably have an opportunity to travel to Mars, but you don’t believe you can write in English?”

I was stunned by his words. After a while, I finally answered: “You got me. Why not?”

Thanks to Wei, who made me believe in something I used not to. My odds of getting to Mars are rising now.

Also thanks to my friend Ken Liu, a talented author and translator of speculative fiction. He helped me to modify my story and also gave me many valuable suggestions.

By the way, I drew a picture of the seal pup in my story. It looks harmless and huggable. So don’t panic if one day in the future it shows up in the real world. Try to shake its paw in a friendly manner — and have a talk with it.

This month’s Futures story in Nature Physics sees Ian Watson go in search of alien civilizations in Undervoidable. Ian is no stranger to Futures — nor, indeed, to science fiction (he wrote the screen story for the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence) . His story Nadia’s nectar appeared in the Futures 1 anthology and The drained world appeared Futures 2. He has also explored thought-mail, divine diseases and flying saucers in his work for Futures. You can keep up-to-date with Ian’s activities at his website. Here, he explains what inspired his story about alien lizards and the void. As ever, please read the story first.

 Writing Undervoidable

Before falling asleep, I used to muse about the Fermi paradox — didn’t we all? If there are alien civilizations, why is there no evidence of them? Beats counting sheep any time. But by now our Solar System seems so highly untypical, our homeworld itself the result of a long string of accidents. As for the evolution of complex, intelligent creatures such as Ours Truly, life on Earth paused for two billion years before the simple cell got itself kickstarted somehow. This is a bit slow compared with the effervescent opening sequence of The Big Bang Theory.

In a Universe of billions of galaxies each housing billions of stars, over billions of years it’s perfectly reasonable that some world somewhere hits the jackpots. We did so; and this signifies absolutely nothing, except that thus I am able to state this. Finding an inhabitable ‘Second Earth’ only a ‘mere’ 500 light years away, as in my story, may be outrageously fictional. (Or not; two jackpot winners may crop up in the same street.) That my resident aliens seem only a few hundred years behind us technologically is a giant coincidence — but real life contains many more coincidences than would be allowable in fiction.

Having now tossed the Fermi paradox out of the window, there’s a better paradox: if Artificial Intelligence is possible, where are they? Advanced AIs from our parent Universe or from a previous cycle should have made it through; they’d have had long enough to think about how.

No, we’re all alone. And this is a good thing! ET civilizations don’t routinely arise only to crash inevitably to extinction. We have a chance.

But what if we do find less advanced companions? Ruthless logic suggests we should exterminate them as potential future competitors. Or do we owe them a duty of care?  ‘Companionable colonization’, unlike the sort visited upon native Americans, for instance?

Unfortunately we may have made an extinction-level error just by travelling to find them. Nowadays I muse about extinction-level errors before falling asleep.

This story came about by thinking about nothing — admittedly in the sense of the void. Writers are working hard when they stare out of the window into the distance. Don’t interrupt by telling them to do the vacuuming.