This week’s story is Corridors, marks the welcome return to Futures of Rahul Kanakia. Rahul’s previous forays in Futures have talked about the dangers of spam, introduced us to the mysterious Driver, offered a somewhat niche way to ride out the economic crash and visited Ted Agonistes. His first book, a contemporary young adult novel called Enter Title Here, is coming out from Disney-Hyperion in August 2016. If you want to know more, you can visit his blog at https://www.blotter-paper.com or follow him on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/rahkan. Here, Rahul reveals what inspired his latest Futures tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Corridors

When I wrote Corridors, I was feeling very, very lonely. It seemed to me that I’d spent my whole life trying to find romantic love, and that there wasn’t a single person in the world who was willing to take a chance on loving me. Intellectually, I knew that wasn’t true. If someone could fall in love with Charles Manson, then someone could fall in love with me. But that intellectual belief didn’t help matters. The whole concept of love seemed so chancy and random: you just pick one person? And they pick you? Really?

At the same time, I’d been asked to write a short story for an anthology called Upside Down Tropes, wherein you picked some well-worn science-fiction conceit and tried to breathe new life into it. For my part, I’d several months earlier picked the concept of the city planet: a world, like Coruscant or Trantor, that’s entirely covered by buildings. The idea of a city planet makes very little rational sense. The surface area of the Earth is immense. Even with seven billion people, most of the Earth is empty. I live in a major metropolitan area and within one hour I’d be in empty space: not farmland or rangeland … just pure empty grassland. A planet that was entirely populated would contain quadrillions of people. As it’s likely that the Earth’s population will cap out at nine billion, it’s absurd to imagine us ever reaching those population levels. Really, the city planet was more a function of 1950s and 1960s fears about overpopulation and the ways that city life was dehumanizing people. But, then again, that’s true of most science fiction. We concretize our fears. That’s what the genre is about.

In any case, I was having a very difficult time writing this city planet story. I went through draft after draft. It took me almost a month, and I ended up completing the story a few days after going out on my second date with the woman who’s now my girlfriend.

But that story went out to a different editor (i.e. it’s not the one you’re reading now). This story came about because a month or two later, though, I went poking through those earlier drafts, looking for a page or two that I remembered writing: a page that felt so pregnant with the sorrow and longing that I’d felt during that now-vanished time in my life. After unearthing those pages, I pondered, for awhile, how to turn them into a real story. But then, after a few days, I realized that the story was already complete. The story was about a man who was wandering through a city of quadrillions of people. When he looks around, he knows that someday one of these people will be with him, but even that knowledge isn’t enough to stop him from feeling completely alone …

By day, James Reinebold is an AI programmer in the video-game industry. Fortunately, when he’s not programming, he writes, and this week’s Futures story is the result. Coin-operated dancer considers the potential glitches with AI — and does so with some happening dance moves. You can keep up to date with James via his website and his Twitter feed. Here he explains the background to his latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

 Writing Coin-operated dancer

I listen to a music streaming service while I program.  It works like an eager-to-please robotic DJ:  suggesting new songs based on what I’ve already told it that I like.  Although it can be frustrating when it makes silly suggestions, overall the algorithm does a pretty solid job of picking out what I want to listen to.  And all I had to do was give it a few examples.

The concept of how a few lines of code can model and even offer new insight into problem spaces as diverse as computational fluid dynamics, car navigation and music fascinates me.  My story is a reaction to that:  we can hook up fancy sensors and engineer the most elaborate learning algorithms possible, but unless we provide these things with some actual experience they’re going to be pretty useless.

I’m pretty optimistic for the future of artificial intelligence.  It’s amazing what computers can do.  How well our algorithms work in practice, though, ultimately depends on us providing solid, representative data to them as inputs (which is yet another reason for diversity in the sciences!).  If we hope to train robots to dance and sing, we need to prepare their neural networks and radial basis functions for a big, beautiful and noisy universe.

In Wading into water, this week’s Futures author, Todd Honeycutt, faces a parental dilemma and explores how technology may have a profound effect on family relationships. Here he reveals what inspired the tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Wading into water

My family and I vacation every year in a small town on the New Jersey shore. As I sat on the boardwalk one sunny morning a year ago in August, I looked out at the sand and the sea, and considered how the beach might look fifty, a hundred years from now. In particular, I wondered how people might change in their use of it. That made me think about what people did with the beach fifty or a hundred years before. People came, played in the waves and the sand, relaxed. No matter how society changes, some people will still take time to unwind by the ocean. The technology may change, the styles, the attitudes (and probably the location), but in the future, we’ll still feel that allure to vacation by the shore.

At the same time, I’d been turning around ideas about what would be possible if we could actually upload our personalities into some sort of wetware, what choices we might make, and the intergenerational tension that naturally arises with technological advances. I overlaid a father/daughter relationship onto that future beach setting, adding a bit of my daughter, Gillian — nine years old at the time — and the result is this story.

In this week’s Futures story, Felicia Davin’s love of language is given free rein: Neuraugment, verb looks at the possible pitfalls of neural augmentation courtesy of a dictionary. You can find out more about Felicia’s work on Twitter and Tumblr. Here she kindly explains how her Futures story came about — as ever it pays to read the story first.

 Writing Neuraugment, verb

I spend a lot of time with dictionaries for my work. I especially love the OED or its French counterpart, the Trésor de la langue française, because their entries detail a word’s etymology and also include quotations that show its usage. Sometimes these citations stretch back over hundreds of years, and as you read through the list of fragmented phrases, you get an idea of how a particular word has changed. Meanings and pronunciations shift. Words fall out of favour or surge back into popular usage or emerge as new inventions. Sometimes, reading a dictionary entry feels a little bit like reading a story.

We invent new words every year, and some of them survive and prosper long enough to be added to dictionaries. What words might be in the dictionaries of the future? It struck me as an opportunity for science fiction. And I had read great fiction that slipped into other forms of prose — letters, diaries, newspaper articles, classified ads, headlines, blog entries, tweets — so writing the story itself as a dictionary entry sounded like an interesting challenge.

I wanted my dictionary entry to offer a glimpse of communication in the future. Many of the examples in the story echo our present fears about how technology might be affecting our social interactions. Will we stop talking face-to-face because of our smartphones? I doubt it. But now that we have so many ways to contact each other, getting together in person could take on a different significance.

As I was thinking about the effect of technology on language, I started thinking about how the Internet seems to have sped up the pace of language change, as we can track new words as they get invented, and sometimes discarded. (For example, a recent Language Log post used Twitter data to track ‘on fleek’ and ‘fleeked out’, and linguist Gretchen McCulloch discussed “vintage internet slang” at The Toast.) I wondered if there might be some future technological advance that would slow down language change. If people could communicate through thought alone, if they could share wordless feelings or images or music or half-formed ideas without having to talk at all, what would become of spoken and written language? I think they would still exist — writing has been around for five thousand years, and speech for far longer than that — but, like face-to-face conversations in the age of smartphones, they might be imbued with new and different meanings.

This month’s Futures story in Nature Physics sees the welcome return of Stewart C Baker with his story Love and relativity. Last time, he taught us about the dangers of using a quantum disambiguator, and this time he again faces the perils of the multiverse. You can keep up to date with his activities on his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, Stewart kindly explains the origins of his latest tale — as usual it pays to read the story first.

Writing Love and relativity

The inspiration for Love and relativity came from a few different sources.

The most immediate inspiration was a prompt-based writing contest run every year by Codex Online Writers Group.  All the participants get four prompts to choose from and have to write a complete piece of flash fiction from scratch in about 48 hours.  It’s about as hectic as it sounds, but it’s a lot of fun — and if you’re as good at procrastinating as I am, that tight deadline helps a lot with focus and follow-through.

The prompts I used for this story were: “Someone made a bad decision and someone else is paying the price” and “Pick one object that’s different from other similar objects. Why?”.  I definitely don’t think experimental space travel is ‘a bad decision’ — I’m a space nerd, and have been trying to convince my pre-schoolers to be astronauts for ages now already — but it can certainly be dangerous.  I was caught by the idea of something going wrong in space, and what that would mean for those left behind here on Earth.  Thinking of space travel also brought to mind the Fermi paradox, which tied in neatly with the second prompt: why do we appear to be alone in the observable Universe?

And from the Fermi paradox, it’s a pretty straight jump over to experimental faster-than-light travel, quantum computing and accidentally hopping between universes!

Okay, maybe not so much.  But all the same, I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of parallel universes.  There’s Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, The Long Earth series by Stephen Baxter and the much-lamented  Terry Pratchett (whose Discworld series is probably where I first encountered the idea of a multiverse, if it wasn’t the 1990s American TV show Sliders), and movies such as Looper and Primer, which explore the ‘alternate future timelines’ aspect of time travel in a similar way.

Most directly, though, I got the idea for this aspect of the story from Tara Tallan’s Galaxion, a web-comic that ought to appeal to anyone with an interest in classic sci-fi.  The premise of Galaxion should be immediately familiar to anyone who’s just read Love and relativity: an experimental ship drive has been created that allows users to jump into a parallel universe.  When a crew of somewhat eccentric planetary scientists get their ship ‘borrowed’ by a psuedo-military outfit and ‘upgraded’ to use the experimental engine, you can imagine that life on board gets a little out of hand.  The comic’s got adventure and good humour in spades, as well as the occasional dash of drama and interdimensional aliens, not to mention some wonderful hats.  It’s been running for years in one form or another, and is currently updating every Tuesday.

To circle back around to ‘space nerd’, at the time I was writing the story, ISRO was in the news for putting its Mangalyaan satellite into orbit around Mars — and for the heavily shared photo of several female ISRO employees celebrating the mission’s success.  In what is stereotypically considered a very male field, it’s fantastic to see some of the many female engineers, scientists and other workers getting recognition.  Every time I see the photo, I feel happy and inspired, and the setting and cast of this story is my small tribute to everything it represents.

I would also like to thank fellow writers Naru Sundar, S.B. Divya, Keyan Bowes and Rati Mehrotra for fixing my character names and answering my questions about marriage ceremonies, and everyone on Codex who left anonymous comments on a slightly shorter first draft.

As for the … unusual format of the story?  Well, I’m an academic librarian by trade.  I love a good annotated bibliography.

Carie Juettner makes her Futures debut this week with her cautionary tale Time flies. You can keep up to date with her latest activities at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, Carie reveals the origins of her latest tale — as usual it pays to read the story first.

Writing Time flies

I wrote the first draft of this story on April Fool’s Day. I’d signed up for the April monthly challenge on 750words.com, a resource I find useful in helping me get to the page. On April first, rather than tackle my current work in progress, I decided to sit down with a brand new idea and see where it took me.

I’ve always been a fan of word play and the phrase ‘time flies’ had been in my head for a while. I thought about what would happen if I took it literally and what else might happen if I switched the word ‘flies’ from verb to noun. Then I started typing.

The story came pretty freely. I enjoyed thinking about the idea of being able to add years to your life (you only have to catch them first) but the more I wrote, the more I began to see the inherent flaw in the process. At the time, I’d also been buying a few scratch-off lottery tickets. I remember thinking how if I never won anything, it would be easy to give up, but I almost always got a dollar or two or three, and that made me feel like the ‘big one’ was just around the corner.

I tried to keep the story lighthearted, but it’s definitely a sobering issue. Here these two young people are wasting the time they have trying to bank more hours. It’s something that, in subtle ways, a lot of us do — worry about the future and lose sight of the present.

I left Kat and Jeremy standing in the dusk, still grasping for more time, but I dearly hope they manage to break free from the cycle and move on.