This week’s story from Futures is Under an uncaring sky by William Meikle. No stranger to Futures, William has previously warned of the extraterrestrial dangers of Twitter, has tried to save the world with a fungus, has discovered the perils of lacunae, and found a novel way to control a classroom full of alien-controlled children. Author of 20 novels and countless short stories, William can be found on his website or you can follow him on Twitter to see what he’s up to. Here he reveals what brought about his latest apocalyptic vision. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Under an uncaring sky

Coincidentally, the story of a possible Maunder Minimum event broke on the day that I sold this story to the editors at Nature Futures, but the roots of it go back a long way for me.

I’ve got a science degree, in botany from Glasgow University, gained in the dim distant past when the world was young and grants were plentiful. A lot of my fiction has its roots there, and has its branches in the reading I was also doing at that time. Much of that reading was apocalyptic in nature, from Stephen King’s The Stand to Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time series, and Niven and Pournelle’s big-budget disaster novels. It was only natural that some of that would seep in to my own writing once I got going.

But probably the main influence was my other reading strand — in the otherness of Lovecraft, the paranoia of Kafka, and in the general air of pessimism arising in me as to our long-term fate as a species. Mix that in with growing up at the height of the NASA lunar missions and my never-fading sense of wonder and awe at the majesty of our cosmos, and you have some idea where this tale originated.

Global warming is well documented, and a well trodden path in fiction these recent years, but it was off-planet influences in our future that I was thinking about. One day last winter, I had an idea of a cold, dark environment, and of us hiding there, small and frightened and unable to do much about it. I wondered how that might play out.

And here it is.

Under an uncaring sky is a wee story of darkness, paranoia, a whimper at the end of all things, and our place in the Universe — hefty stuff for less than a thousand words, but the protagonist’s voice spoke to me and I wrote it down.

I think I’ve done him justice, but that’s for you to decide.

This week, Futures welcomes back S R Algernon with his story In a new light, which gives a very fresh meaning to the concept of Hell… Previously, S R Algernon has brought us tales of asymmetrical warfare, phlogiston, intergalactic phishing scams, the dangers of letting AIs look after the remains of the human race and ambitions in time travel, as well as a Christmas story. Here, he explains what inspired his latest piece. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing In a new light

In early drafts of In a new light, the focus of the story was on a hapless extraterrestrial delivery person who, upon bringing cargo meant for Venus to Earth by mistake, is mistaken for a devil. The link between Hell and the Venusian climate seemed like a striking image and metaphor to me, but it wasn’t enough to carry a story on its own. Later on, when I read about the more favourable temperature and pressure conditions in Venus’s atmosphere, it occurred to me that poor Venus might be a promising candidate for colonization, but one that has suffered bad press on account of its unpleasant surface conditions.

Returning to mythological and theological issues, I wondered why Lucifer and other fallen angels would live in such inhospitable surroundings. If Satan or fallen angels ruled Hell, would they not want to live someplace comfortable? Besides, what did they need all those souls for anyway? To me, the existence of Hell did not seem to make sense tactically in the context of a celestial rebellion against God.

I remembered Venus (and Lucifer). What if the fallen angels had taken Venus as their refuge and adapted to its hot conditions? They might need water and organic material that would be hard to come by on Venus. If they could somehow build a portal to Earth, they could use human labour (presumably sinners) to obtain raw materials. Eventually, they might succeed in building floating habitats for the human workforce, so that they don’t have to poach human souls from Earth anymore.

Ned Goodman’s suggestion at the end is intended as a commentary on both theology and planetary exploration. First, deities and their followers might best be judged by how they benefit those around them, rather than where their loyalties lie in some cosmic battle. Second, we might reconsider our warmer neighbour as a candidate for colonization — in big, air-filled, acid-resistant balloons. If Lucifer can offer us a new path to the stars, I think we should at least give it a look.

This week marks the welcome return to Futures of Ian Stewart. Uninhabitable zone takes a fresh look at what it means to be an extremophile. Ian is a mathematician and a writer of both popular science and science fiction. You can keep up-to-date with his activities at his website and by following him on Twitter. Ian is no stranger to Futures having previously provided stories about the economics of the afterlife, time travel, the dangers of simulating history, travels to alien worlds, the power of the mind and (with Jack Cohen) the Monolith. Here, Ian kindly takes time out of his busy schedule to reveal what inspired him to write his latest Futures tale. As usual, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Uninhabitable zone

I’ve never been comfortable with the prevalent idea that Earth is the perfect habitat for life, that it may be the only inhabited planet in a Universe with gazillions of planets, not to mention exomoons, that life must be based on water, carbon, DNA and proteins, and that the only places where life could possibly occur are planets orbiting in the badly misnamed ‘habitable zone’ of a main sequence star.

Life adapts to its environment, so what’s needed is an environment that allows sufficiently complex processes to occur. They don’t have to happen the way they do here, or on the timescale they do here, or using the same ingredients that they do here. With a little imagination, endless exotic forms of quasi-life can at least be conceived. Some of them might even exist.

Fortunately, astrobiologists are now starting to come to similar conclusions, and are increasingly exploring more exotic possibilities, such as life in Europa’s oceans, or on a super-Earth. I played around with the basic idea of this tale for several years. It started when I read Edward E. Smith’s Spacehounds of IPC, in which aliens living on an icy world (Titan, as it happens) are astonished to see a human, whose veins are filled with molten ice, welding even hotter liquid metal without any special protection.

Astrobiologists call cold-loving organisms extremophiles. I hate that word. It assumes we’re normal and everything else is extreme. It lumps bacteria that live under ice in the Antarctic with ones that live in boiling pools in Yellowstone Park, for heaven’s sake. Each type of organism is perfectly comfortable in its own environment; in fact, it would die if moved to a significantly different one. To the Yellowstone bacteria, we are extremophiles.

And the same goes for cold-loving organisms, who would consider Pluto habitable, and Earth to be an overheated wasteland of toxic oxygen and its poisonous dihydride… liquid rock.

After that, the story wrote itself. It’s coincidence that it’s come out just after New Horizons visited Pluto. And found mountains of water ice — solid rock.

This month’s Nature Physics plays host to an intriguing Futures story by Aldous Mercer called Overseer. If you’ve ever wished you could clone yourself so that you can do all of the things you want (and have) to do, then this story might give you pause. You can keep up-to-date with Aldous’s activities at his website or by following him on Twitter.  Here, he reveals what inspired him to write Overseer — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Overseer

Overseer started as a personal fantasy — shared by almost everyone I know, at some point in their lives — of being able to split myself in two (or four) to get more work done, to read more for pleasure, to travel, to stay at home and do the laundry.

Like many other science-fiction writers, my primary profession is that of a scientist and engineer, and any writing I do is by necessity relegated to the 04:00–06:00 timeslot. My works often take on the overtones of, if not addiction, then at the very least obsession. Compulsion. Administrative tasks, and personal correspondence, and my sorely underutilized rowing machine, they are all pushed to the side. And then the fantasy recurs — if only I could somehow find the time to do everything I wanted to!

But as I grow older, I believe more and more that time is not the problem. Energy, and will-power, and attention-spans are the conserved resources here, and all the people that I am (defined by my functions), they all draw upon the same well. It is not a deep one.

Overseer was born when, for the very first time in my life, I was slapped in the face with evidence of my parents’ mortality. I was oceans away from them, these two ageing, worthy, deeply loved people. On that day, my fantasies of doubling myself so I could write another novel, or set up a folding-cot at work without spousal retribution, all those fantasies evaporated, replaced by a sort of despair that there exists no physical mechanism by which I can split myself, halve all of me permanently, to be there for all the people that need me today.

This week, the focus turns to the consumer world in Stephen S. Power’s debut Futures story Stripped to zero. You can catch up with Stephen’s work on his webpage or by following him on Twitter. Here, he explains what inspired his tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Stripped to zero

Stripped to zero began with a line that I just heard in my head one night: “My son mistakes the soda machine for his mother.” I spent the rest of the night trying to figure out why.

The initial draft was far shorter and took place only in the 24Shop. It was built around my take on Clarke’s maxim because what’s true of any advanced technology is also true for parents. To children they can do magic. They make things appear as if out of thin air. They speak without moving their lips. They defend you with their superpowers. And it’s all a con as parents desperately attempt to keep their children from looking behind the curtain for as long as possible. In this case what’s behind the curtain is resentment and a need for control.

What expanded the story was my then thinking: why didn’t the mother show up? I realized that she saw the same dynamic at work between the Internet of Things and the citizen consumer, the former hiding its mundane self behind the miracles of a networked world.

So in writing the story, I wondered: How soon would an actual Shop24 begin to take data from our kids’ protective bracelets, then tell them what they should eat? When would mirrors and toilets become data-collection centres? At what point would TVs start recording and repurposing for profit what we watch in our homes? How soon would consumers become the real products and citizen always live, not just communicate, in plain view of the authorities? And how could we escape — or would we want to?

Of course, this led me to wonder something even more disturbing. Did the line that started my story come from the Muses, or was it directed at me by an audio spotlight?