In this week’s Futures story, we get to meet Norbert, a Synthetic who is facing a fairly serious problem. The shoulder of Orion marks the debut of Eric Garside in Futures, and sees him wrestle with life and death issues. Eric is a software developer by day, and you can keep up to date with his activities on his Twitter feed. Here, Eric reveals how his latest tale came about. As usual, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The shoulder of Orion

From an early age, I was drawn to sci-fi stories. Originally introduced to the genre by way of Asimov, I would catch myself often daydreaming of electric sheep instead of statistics homework; of grey goo while in gym class. My mind was dominated with thoughts of robots, starships and rayguns, and as a software developer by trade today, I can’t help but credit a burning desire to bring these thoughts to reality as the impetus for teaching myself to code.

These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, organic 3D printers and what it would take to create synthetic life. I believe that within my lifetime we will develop the technology to reliably communicate with other sentient non-human animals (elephants, gorillas, whales), and that thought alone keeps me up at night with anticipation. Spending a lot of time thinking about these topics has forced some deep introspection about what it means to be alive, and what exactly makes us human.

The stations my train of thought travels between are vast, varied and inclusive of the obscure, obtuse and irrelevant. And as the experts advise, one should always “write what they know” …

Before this story, I hadn’t written prose in a while, and so I used my tabula rasa as an opportunity to feel out a new writing style. Luckily, I had a couple browncoat friends from college who were excited to offer insight into how they liked their sci-fi. From our conversations, I gleaned four simple rules to keep in mind while writing:

1. The human element is the most interesting; let me know and care about a character.

2. The setting is important, but don’t talk about it extensively.

3. Hard sci-fi can get really boring.

4. Robots are cool.

So it is with these rules in mind, that I’ve tried to present the ideas that captivate me in a way that was compelling for readers. I’ll leave you with what is the most inspirational quote I’ve ever heard, which (unsurprisingly) came from sci-fi:

We are the Universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. — Delenn, Babylon 5

Lynette Mejía makes her Futures debut this week with her story The memory of trees. You can keep up to date with her work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here Lynette reveals the origins of her latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first to avoid the spoilers.

Writing The memory of trees

The memory of trees was written as part of a flash-fiction contest through a writer’s group I belong to. I don’t generally win these little contests, but I always get great feedback on improving any story I submit, so I try to enter as many as possible.

This story arose from my thinking about the role of art in science fiction. Many stories about the future focus solely on where technology will take us in the coming decades and centuries, but I wanted to think about what function art might serve in the future world I was imagining, a world that, having been completely destroyed, was focused almost solely on survival. What effect would the absence of the natural world have on our collective psyche, and could art, in some way, function to fill that void?

To me, the beauty of art is twofold: first, it is a representation of the world that has been filtered through human experience, and is therefore both unique and universal; and second, it functions on a cathartic level, allowing us to bear emotional trauma that might otherwise break us. I don’t believe the future, however it turns out, will be devoid of art; and in fact, I don’t believe it can be. The memory of trees is my take on that idea.

This week, Futures is pleased to publish our first story from Dan Stout. Outpatient presents a rather bad day in hospital that is going to cause a fairly severe headache for a lot of people. You can catch up with what Dan is doing at his website or follow him on Twitter. Here, he offers an insight into the inspiration for Outpatient — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Outpatient 

I suffer from migraines.

Not the ones with auras, just the ‘common’ kind that shoot pain down my temples and make me feel a stranger in my own body, the floors of my home rolling under my feet like a ship at sea.

I don’t get them often, and I’ve always been lucky enough not to be dealing with anything that couldn’t be put to the side while I wait out the pain. But what if I couldn’t? What if I woke to a nearly debilitating migraine right when the world was falling to pieces around me?

I’m fascinated by the protagonist’s role in Outpatient. She’s an active participant in the story and struggles valiantly, but in the inevitable newspaper write-ups she will only ever be mentioned as one of the many unfortunate victims of this tragedy.

Speaking of the victims, those people affected by Kim and Ellen’s work will have quite a bit of adaptation ahead of them, and many difficult conversations with families. What will their legal status be? Is any of this reversible? Just like our own lives, there are so many questions and no way to make them stop.

Sometimes the only choice is to cover our eyes and wait for the pain to fade away.

This week’s Futures story is The ravelled sleeve of care by Anatoly Belilovsky. Born in what is now Ukraine, Anatoly is a paediatrician based in New York. This week’s story is the fourth piece he has written for Futures — he has previously introduced us to the Gifts of the Magi, as well as Bottled up and Nor custom stale. You can find out what he’s up to by following him on Twitter. Here, he explains the origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The ravelled sleeve of care

Everything I know about writing I learned from Chekhov. Consider this bit of wisdom:

“Don’t tell me the Moon is shining; show me the glint of moonlight on broken glass —”

Actually, this may be apocryphal. What he DID say, in a story called Hydrophobia, was:

“The dam, flooded with moonlight, showed not a bit of shade; on it, in the middle, the neck of a broken bottle glittered like a star.”

The proximate inspiration for The ravelled sleeve of care is the story considered to be Chekhov’s most iconic, yet rarely referred to by name. It is Van’ka, a story of a nine-year-old boy apprenticed to a shoemaker (a subtle tug on the Russian heartstrings, where “drinks like a shoemaker” is an axiom),  who writes a letter to his grandfather (using, again, the heartrending diminutive “dedushka” as opposed to the generic “ded”) begging to be returned to what is left of his family, promising to be good, asking his grandfather to beat him if he is not — and, in Chekhov’s inimitable style, he attaches the stamps (no doubt bought instead of food or clothes) and addresses the letter “Na derevnyu dedushke” — “To my grandfather in the village”.

The other inspiration for this story is Srinivasa Ramanujan, the great and tragic genius autodidact. Van’ka’s tragedy was that he would (in the reader’s mind) never leave his post; Ramanujan’s tragedy was that he did, shortening his life considerably. At the end of The ravelled sleeve of care, I hope I leave the reader with the distinctly un-Chekhovian hope that things will get better.

And in a distinctly non-Nature manner, allow me to qualify this with: ‘somehow’.

Martin Hayes is no stranger to Futures, and his latest story is Like buses, which appears this month in Nature Physics. The tale is a thought-provoking look at how the Mars One mission might unfold. Martin’s earlier stories for Futures include the apocalyptic romance Howard loves Polly, career guidance to youngsters who are thinking about joining the space corps, a creature called Spamface and Me am Petri, which found its way into the Futures 2 anthology. You can find out more about Martin’s various activities on his website or by keeping an eye on him on Twitter. Here, Martin reveals the role of luck and W. B. Yeats in the production of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

 Writing Like buses

Like buses, my fifth story for Futures, was conceived of and written in about 45 minutes on a dull and dreary Wednesday morning back in mid-February. I rose early, showered, and while I was cooking breakfast (scrambled eggs and streaky bacon with a properly massive pot of strong-drawn tea, if you must know) I caught the end of a radio segment about an Irish guy who’d made the shortlist of candidates for the Mars One project.

I had only the vaguest notions of what Mars One was about so, after breakfast, when I’d plonked myself down at the desk to try and maybe, perhaps, possibly write something, I googled it and opened a few tabs.

The web pages were still open when I e-mailed the editor of The Green Book, a journal on Irish gothic literature, to propose that I write an essay for him on the occult interests of W. B. Yeats and his involvement with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The editor e-mailed me back straight away to say that this was a great idea, that he’d love to do it, but he’d just commissioned an almost identical article from someone else. I chuckled to myself and replied, stating that essays about W. B. Yeats and the occult are like buses, you wait ages for one and then two show up at once.

I went back to reading about Mars One (anything, anything to avoid actually having to sit and think and write something) and as I stared at an artist’s depiction of a sparse Martian outpost, the phrase ‘like buses’ flashed in my mind. The story landed, unbidden, in my brain pan at that moment. I fired up my twelve-year-old word processing software and bashed the story out in about three-quarters of an hour.

I wish they all came that easily. I really do.

This week in Futures, we’re pleased to welcome back Preston Grassmann with his story Broken maps of the sea. Preston has previously written for us about The vermilion market and Midnight in the cathedral of time. He has very kindly taken time out of his busy schedule to reveal what inspried his latest story — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Broken maps of the sea

Mythologies, much like our endeavours in science, are an attempt to give shape to  experience, to order the world in ways that can help us understand its complexity. As the world around us changes, so will the stories we tell. In Broken maps of the sea I wanted to give the sense of a large-scale mythology deeply informed by the world it describes.

The scientific concept that inspired the idea for Broken maps of the sea was a theory proposed by Stephen J. Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972 called ‘punctuated equilibrium’ — the idea that the rate of evolution changes according to the adaptive needs of individual species. Given the rapid changes taking place in our environment, the question of how a species might adapt takes on a rather ominous poignancy.

Before this theory was proposed, it was widely held that species could evolve only at a slow and continuous rate. Currently, many evolutionary biologists support the idea of rapid changes along with gradualism, and fossil records seem to indicate a case for both views.

Granted, the story takes this concept to an extreme, but the core concept is still there.