This week’s Futures story is Duck, duck, duck, a tale about childhood by Samantha Murray. You can keep track of Sam’s writing at her website. Here, she kindly takes a moment to discuss the origins of her latest story — as ever it pays to read the tale first.

Writing Duck, duck, duck

I don’t have all that many memories of my childhood. (I have a fantastic short-term memory for learning lines in a play, or memorizing a textbook, but long-term stuff, not so much.) But one thing I do get a strong sense of when I look back is how different my thinking was as a child. There were so many things happening in my head that the adults were unaware of, and little things could take on enormous significance.

And, as with Candice and the kids playing the game, children are always more aware of things than we think. They may process that information differently inside their heads, but they pick up on what’s going on.

I have my own children now, and it can be easy to forget these things, to think that they are just miniature people, less experienced but fundamentally the same. But they’re really not. In fact they are a little bit … alien.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Andrea Kriz to the section with her story Chrysalis. Andrea is a PhD student at Harvard and won the 2015 Ilona Karmel Prize for Writing Science Fiction. Here, she kindly offers an insight into what inspired her tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Chrysalis

Every week I get my copy of Nature in the mail, flip to the back, and read Futures on the way up in my apartment building’s (freakishly slow) elevator. I think that exposure in general is what motivated me to start writing flash fiction. But one story, I believe in one of last spring’s issues, especially stuck with me. It was about a bakery in space and people coming in and reminiscing about Earth, which had been destroyed, and I remember seriously wondering: what would it be like to lose and forget your home, forget your city — forget your entire planet? It felt like being punched in the gut. That kind of feeling came back when I was writing Chrysalis. 

Another inspiration was the mecha anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Mainly a quote from one of the last episodes: “[Humanity] will utilize that which they hate most of all in order to survive.” At first I thought the story wasn’t going to work because who could be stupid enough to mistake an alien life form for a pilotable robot? But then I thought: couldn’t someone build organic machines that evolve like the real thing? And then wouldn’t evolving to utilize their pilots as a fuel source become the next logical step? No? Just me? Okay.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back Mohamad Atif Slim, whose first story for us appeared back in  2011 and subsequently was featured in the Futures 2 anthology. In this latest tale, we get to meet Carusi — The man with the spider — who is having a really, really bad day. Here, we get a glimpse into what inspired Atif to write the piece — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The man with the spider

Reading this piece again after a few months, I’ve only just realized how very negative it is! Carusi is on a(n accidentally) self-imposed death row and is bawling his eyes out by the end when he realizes that he has no way out. This is dystopian fiction with emo tendencies — definitely no space opera! But perhaps that was the whole point — it is the distilled extract of a longer story I had meant to write, which began with the image of a man checking into a hotel that he knew he would never check out of. (I’ll admit that the idea randomly came halfway through watching Alfonso Cuarón’s film adapation of P.D. James’s The Children of Men, probably through a mouthful of masticated beef burger, inspired as I continue to be by the vast array of vile dystopian worlds the human mind is able to conjure and publish.)

There is a handful of references to lend dimension (all the drugs mentioned have real-life cognates, and an ‘Acute Stress Reaction’ is an actual diagnosis you can find in the DSM-IV), but The man with the spider itself, highly condensed, was simply born out of a desire to narrate. It’s a cogitation on nihilism in abbreviated prose, illustrated via a convenient and contracted arc — nihilism as a product of a detached political legacy, of social disenfranchisement, of economic depravity, of health inequities and a culture of doublespeak and paradoxes, of human spontaneity and vulnerability. It is linear and expository and vaguely existentialist in its invocation of sacrifice and meaning. Its form serves its purpose; it is self-serving. It is bleak, but what it isn’t is unsympathetic or hopeless. The natural human tendency is to seek and apply meaning to its pursuits — when nihilism consumes us, I think there’s a good argument for a systematic failure of social structures that could have buffered that fall.

I do enjoy fully fleshed dystopian fiction now and again — some people might say that there’s already too much of it, but I would argue that there can never be enough; it is sociopolitical discourse for those of us too lazy to craft impassioned essays or newspaper articles, relayed through illustration rather than listless lists. I enjoy it not to contemplate the fiction, but the slivers of non-fiction that always lie in a good story’s foundations.

This week, Futures is very pleased to welcome Robert Reed to the section, with his story Musings on time travel. Bob has authored a large number of short stories and a good number of novels (as well as winning a Hugo). You catch up with his activities on his website. Here, he kindly offers an insight into the creative process behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Musings on time travel

Forty years of writing, thirty-plus as a professional, and I’ve learned a few tricks. For instance, sometimes my words are rather lovely and possibly a little bit wise, and oh my, I feel justifiably proud to have dreamed them up. But the trouble is that in this particular story, on this particular day, those words don’t belong. They don’t play well with the theme, or they hurt the pace, or they just need some other home. And after forty years in the business, I’ll unceremoniously yank them out of the manuscript, creating a leaner, better product. I hope.

I’ve gotten rather good at pruning and salvaging. I don’t have any use for the standard writing software. I work on the cloud, usually with Google Docs, and I keep a special file called ‘Etceteras’. This is where I bank what might be useful later. And as it happens, one of those discarded bits was a paragraph offering an odd interpretation about life. And more importantly, why does animated water insist on picturing itself as existing inside something called ‘time’?

As it happens, that paragraph didn’t have to wait long. I began a new story, a tale where two time travellers chat amiably. Each character has his own point-of-view, and one of my people needed to voice some interesting thoughts.

I love finding a good job for a set-aside phrase.

And I enjoy pruning overgrown stories. Time is short, for me and for everyone, and if I save two thousand people two minutes each …

Well, that sounds like the beginnings of an interesting story. Don’t you think so?