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.

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?

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.