Futures is pleased to welcome back J. W. Armstrong with his latest story The sixth circle. He has previously written a couple of stories for Futures: Reversal of misfortune and A final problem. Here he explains what gave rise to his latest tale. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The sixth circle

I have had two stories previously published in Futures. The ideas for those stories came from illness-induced dreams. The sixth circle, however, arose from a chance conversation.

I was in a social situation and the topic, improbably, turned to artificial intelligence. I know little about machine intelligence and I hope I thus disclaimed. But I ended up restating some classical science-fiction AI ideas, including some standard speculations about the Singularity.

At some point in the conversation, an artist-friend wondered: what would motivate an AI? Her comment catalysed The sixth circle.

I wrote the initial draft in a white heat. It included a tangent about why post-Singularity humans would surely be irrelevant and a brief backstory about Ishmael: why his age mattered and more about his connection with the population of wild humans. (In that first draft Ishmael is a more interesting and nuanced character than the cynical drug dealer presenting in the final version.)

Usually anything I write is too short. That initial draft was, however, too long.

I put it aside for a couple of days. When I returned to it, I did a brutal down-selection of words. My goal was to get it to 900 words by deleting anything not essential to the main idea. Some hints at Ishmael’s background survived this edit, but otherwise I tried to be ruthless. I submitted the revised version to Futures and was delighted at its acceptance!

Finally, a comment on the title. The working title was ‘Addicted AIs’ — an awful choice. I wanted a title that did not give away the plot but would be retrospectively predictive of the story’s content. I consulted with my brother and several alternate titles — some making obscure references to classical literature or contemporary urban slang — were considered and rejected. The final title was the simplest, intended to presage the ‘heresy’ involved in the protagonist’s choices.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Rachael K. Jones with her story Houston, Houston, Do You Read James Tiptree?. Rachael is based in Athens, Georgia, and you can keep up with her work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, Rachael reveals the secrets behind her slightly unusually titled tale — as ever it  pays to read the story first.

Writing Houston, Houston, Do You Read James Tiptree?

I have no idea how long our species has engaged in word games, but I’d wager the practice dates back to the dawn of oral communication. Language is more than just our tool. It is our toy, our medium for humour, social bonding and creative invention.

Consider the five components of language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. For each of these five components, we’ve invented games, many of them so embedded into the fabric of our culture that we take them for granted most of the time. Some of these games aid our children in their language development, such as rhyming games that teach the distinctive  sounds of English. Similarly, semantic games like Mad Libs play with parts of speech and word meanings. Other games double as practical tools to aid communication, such as the creation of acronyms (quick, what does LASER stand for?). The game in my story is a syntactic game, designed to reward creativity with clause formation in English.

Legend  has it Gardner Dozois invented the game featured in my story. Its official name is ‘The Man Who Melted Jack Dann’. However, the rule where you create a synopsis to go with your title is my own addition. Houston, Houston, Do You Read James Tiptree? is itself a title/author mashup, and the story is based on the synopsis I thought should go with it.

Most  of these words games can be enjoyed alone, but I’ve always found them more enjoyable with company. In the same way, when I think about the challenges of extended space travel, I think the social-emotional problems of long-term isolation will be among the most difficult to overcome. We’re social creatures at heart. In the absence of someone else to speak to, we won’t learn language to begin with. Houston, Houston, Do You Read James Tiptree? captures a situation that’s just as much about our psychological fragility  in absence of a communication partner as our physical fragility in the cold, empty void of space.

While we’re talking about linguistic games, try out ‘The Man Who Melted Jack Dann’ yourself! It’s challenging and fun trying to discover new, elegant combinations. If you do give it a shot, send me your best ones on Twitter (#sfmashup). I’d love to see what Nature readers can come up with.

Futures this week welcome back Alex Shvartsman with his tale A perfect medium for unrequited love. Regular readers will have seen plenty of Alex’s previous stories (there’s a full list at the end of this post), and if you want to know more about his work, you should check out his website and his Twitter feed. Here Alex takes us behind the scenes of his latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing A perfect medium for unrequited love

Humans have always been afraid of their creations.

From the golem to Frankenstein’s monster, from the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica to the warring AIs of Person of Interest, the message remains: if we create intelligent beings we may not be able to control them and there’s a chance they will turn against us.

Real scientists seem to share this concern. Stephen Hawking recently spoke of dangers of advanced AI. This very journal published an editorial on this subject earlier this year.

And although those concerns are not to be discounted, as a science-fiction writer I was interested in exploring possibilities of AI interacting with humans as neither nemesis nor a benevolent overlord. I wanted to portray such an intelligence as an independent being with its own concerns and desires, and one that showed neither a deep interest in humans nor utterly ignored them.

Jinkochi (which is a loose transliteration of 人工知能 or Jinkō chino, Japanese for artificial intelligence) is capable of filial piety but isn’t consumed with humanity or its problems. And although its goal of “fixing” the planet may coincide with our needs, who is to say that it won’t plant its wildflowers on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue or London’s Downing Street?

So you see, even in my attempt to write a different tale I have not entirely succeeded in escaping the trope of AI running wild.

Perhaps the most fun concept of the story for me to write was envisioning different media the AIs could use to encode information. I figured databases like actuarial tables and metro schedules would be pretty easy, but what might the limit be for a super intelligence? They could certainly influence crop planting patterns and city traffic would be as simple as controlling the lights at intersections. But could they also figure out a way to influence, say, the migratory patterns of birds? These, dear reader, are exactly the sort of things I enjoy most about being a science-fiction writer, and I hope that some of the examples I’ve come up with will amuse you.

More Futures stories by Alex Shvartsman

Ravages of time | The tell-tale ear | The epistolary history | Coffee in end times | The rumination on what isn’t | A one-sided argument | Grains of wheat | Staff meeting, as seen by the spam filter

Author Ben Peek offers an insight into the vibrant world of Australian science-fiction and fantasy.

In 2015, George Miller’s post-apocalypse cult icon Mad Max returned gloriously to cinema in Mad Max: Fury Road, but in late 2013, the literary child of Max — which was begun in Australia in 1979 in Miller’s Mad Max — was Andrew Macrae’s Trucksong, published by Twelfth Planet Press.

Set in the unforgiving landscapes of empty deserts and broken societies, in a world where actions are fuelled not by reason but desire, Macrae’s first novel created its own, unique language for its narrator, John Ra. A phonetic rendition of working-class Australia, Macrae’s choice was not just a success in the novel, but also representative of what Australian science fiction and fantasy needs to define itself in a market dominated by the largest producers of English language genre fiction, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The books that are produced abroad by non-Australian authors pour into the broad emptiness of the Australian market daily, ferried in on the old colonial tracks of trade, for the most part. The local market and its authors, like all subjects of colonization, do not get to travel the same routes out with any ease. This has two impacts, one that impacts established authors, and one that defines new ones. For the first, it is harder for authors to make money from their work. For the second, it feeds generations of new authors the lie that they cannot write unless they adopt the mannerisms of their international peers.

It is important to challenge the last. A country cannot show to the world cheap reflections. It is both bad for art, and bad for the national identity.

Fortunately, there are authors and publishers who do seek to craft unique, Australian fiction.

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book — following on from her wonderful, award winning Carpentaria — is published by Giramondo Publishing. It is set in a future Australia ravaged by climate change. It is an angry book, one that follows the life of a mute woman, Oblivia, who is married to the first Indigenous President of Australia, and confined to a tower. Wright’s book is one that arises out of the heart of Australia’s Indigenous population — from their concerns, their desires, their anger — and focuses on a culture that has lost so much in the colonization of their nation. It is a dark book, one that is often bleak, but also hilarious.

The Australian sense of humour — dry, laconic and dark — is an integral part of Anna Tambour’s work. It resides in the heart of her two novels, Spotted Lily and Crandolin, and her collections, Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales and the recent  The Finest Ass in the Universe (published by Ticonderoga Publications). In Tambour you will find not just Australia, but also the worldly citizen that Australian literature can also be. She is the most modern of white Australian fantasists, drifting from deals with the Devil in Surry Hills in Sydney, to Gorbachev’s Russia, Middle Eastern confectionery artists, horrors, satires and, naturally, donkeys.

Lastly, Trent Jamieson, a traveller of the colonial tracks — in 2010 he began the Death Works series for Orbit in the UK — who has returned to Australia with a new novel, Day Boy, published by one the strongest independent presses in Australia, Text Publishing. It is excellent to see Text bringing back the authors who have left, and even better to see Jamieson return with in a vampire novel set in Australia’s hot, dry landscape. It is defined by a voice that uses the casual colloquialisms unique to English speaking Australians without fear.

The four authors are just a small sampling of what is available in Australia. The modern world is breaking the old colonial tracks down and if you have not read what is being produced, then you can find these books easily online. They provide a good place to start sampling Australian science fiction and fantasy.

Ben Peek is a Sydney-based author. His books include Black Sheep, Twenty-Six-Lies/One Truth, Above/Below, The Godless and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His most recent novel is Leviathan’s Blood.

Download the fully illustrated PDF

This week’s Futures story is slightly different in that it appears both as normal text and as an enhanced graphic-novel style rendering. Written by Andrew Neil Gray and beautifully illustrated by Chris Malbon, the story tackles the thorny issue of whether the Universe is a simulation. The graphic-novel treatment came about as part of Nature’s sci-fi special this week in which, among other things, Nature takes a look at the history of Star Trek and the world of H. G. Wells. At least, that’s what’s happening in Futures’ version of the simulation.

Assuming that Andrew is showing up in your simulation, you can find out more about his work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, Andrew talks us through what inspired his tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Try catch throw

Try catch throw emerged from a prompt. A writing group I belong to held a flash writing challenge earlier this summer and I received a group of prompts. This one in particular caught my attention: You remember something that no one else remembers. Why?

Almost immediately I started thinking about a character entrusted with a secret, someone who has to struggle to keep it hidden. I considered time travel and mind hacking, but the simulation hypothesis (the idea that we might be living in an extremely convincing simulation of reality) connected with me the most.

If you were the only person in the Universe who knew it wasn’t real, how would this come to be and what would this imply? How would it affect your relationships? Then I had the idea of resets, of having the power to try things again as if you were living in a video game, and realized another character would constantly be on the verge of discovering the truth.

I have some programming background, so once I started writing, I remembered the try/catch syntax that exists for error handling in some languages. It immediately felt like the ideal structure for the story. This is one of those stories where once the idea and the structure were set, everything came together quite quickly. It felt almost inevitable…