This week, Futures welcomes Steven Fischer with his story The First Fragmented Church of Entropy. An unusual piece about a religion almost destined to fail. Here, Steven reveals where the idea for his tale came from — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The First Fragmented Church of Entropy

I’m lucky enough to have some very smart friends. The kind of friends who routinely make me feel incompetent (in a way that also manages to make me smile). The kind of friends who think that backpacking trips and campfires are better paired with discussions of thermodynamics and philosophy than marshmallows.

On just one such recent trip, a friend of mine posed the question, what if there was a religion that worshipped entropy? (He’d just finished reading Into the Cool — a fascinating book about the myriad ways entropy shapes our world, our economy and our lives — and was bordering on entropy worship himself.) Weeks later, long after we returned home, that question became stuck in my mind. This piece was an attempt to get it out.

The story began as something serious and dark (and not at all similar to what ended up on the page), but as I began writing, I became more and more convinced that the idea itself was ridiculous. That perhaps entropy is something which by its definition defies worship. As my answer to my friend’s question changed, so did the story, becoming more and more absurd as it grew.

In the end, I settled on the only version of a Church of Entropy I think could ever exist — something silly and inherently hypocritical that, at the end of the day, acknowledges even it is subject to the force it claims to serve.

This week Futures is pleased to welcome Cassandra Khaw and her story Hungry ghosts. You can keep up with Cassandra’s latest work on her website or by following her on Twitter. Here she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Hungry ghosts

Every year, some 700 million people purportedly participate in the biggest human migration in the world. I can believe that. I’m one of them. I’ve spent the past six years ping-ponging across the globe, but every Chinese New Year, I go home. I can’t not be home.

Although Hungry ghosts contains only a passing reference to Chinese New Year, it does draw shamelessly from that same sense of familial duty. I’ve always wondered what’d happen if we make it to the stars, if we started darting between galaxies. Would we give up who we were? Would we trade the traditions of our past in favour of creating something new? 

To an extent, yes. Change is inevitable and exciting. But the Chinese people have celebrated their festivals for thousands of years. We’ve always fought to go home. We’ve always made it a point to travel hundreds of miles each year, all to find our way back to the hearth. And that got me thinking.

If something like that could prove true for the living, how would it affect the dead? 

If we could upload our consciousnesses to a neural network and continue long after our mortal forms have disintegrated, what would we do? Me, I’d make sure to attend the Hungry Ghost Festival annually. Just for kicks. Heck, I’d be present for everything. Because I can’t imagine not wanting to be home, not wanting to watch over every new generation, not wanting to be there for them. 

I’ve always tried to find my way home. Given an eternity to live, I don’t think I’d ever stop.

In this week’s Futures story, Kevin Lauderdale presents Box 27. When not wrestling with the thorny issue of species definitions, Kevin has found himself writing essays and articles for the Los Angeles Times, The Dictionary of American Biography and McSweeneys.net. You can find out more about his work at his website. Here Kevin reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Box 27

The 1980 TV series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, affected me greatly. I was in grade school when it aired. Although I’d always been vaguely interested in science, this brought home to me the magnificence of the Universe and the wide breadth of what people who worked in the sciences studied.

In the penultimate episode, ‘Encyclopedia Galactica’, Sagan pages through an imaginary compendium of information about billions of worlds. We see entries for three representative planets. Among other information, we read about each planet’s age, its sun’s composition, its technology level and its ‘Society Code’ — its nickname, if you will. Sagan shows us the entry for ‘We Who Survived’, a planet only a little more advanced than Earth. Then there is ‘We Who Became One’, a super-civilization that has harnessed the power of supergiants and pulsars. And finally, Earth: a planet with no extra-planetary colonies, that’s still using fossil fuels and nuclear weapons, and that has only a 40% probability of surviving the next 100 years. Our Society Code is simply ‘Humanity’.

That idea has intrigued me for 36 years now. In the Universe Sagan imagined, how did we choose that name to be known by? Who chose it? Or was it imposed on us by the Encyclopedia’s writers? A few months ago, I began thinking more and more about this. What were some of the other options for labelling us Terrans? What might work and what would not?

Originally, my story had a different ending. Even though I was inspired by Sagan, I didn’t have my hero settle on ‘Humanity’ in the end. But as I fine-tuned my story, I became less and less satisfied with that ending. I sat down and watched much of Cosmos again. I quickly saw how right Sagan had been in making his choice. Thinking back over the whole of the series, I rediscovered the idea that we need to work together in order to solve our problems. Luckily, it is our natural inclination to do so. We are humans, but Humanity means we were not alone. I rewrote the last third of the story to fit the now-correct ending. (An ending that had been correct since 1980. Protip: you can’t improve on Carl Sagan.)

If this story speaks to you in any way, you owe it to yourself to go watch Cosmos. Maybe for the second time, maybe for the first. Celebrate Sagan’s vision, brilliance and, yes, humanity.

Troy Stieglitz makes his debut in Futures this week, with the touching tale of Melissa. By day, Troy is an environmental chemist, but he kindly took some out to explain the origins of his latest story — as ever, it pays to read the tale first.

Writing Melissa

A recent article on time dilation had me thinking: what if interstellar travel was commonplace? Of course there would be implications regarding relativity, but how would that affect the lives of a crew aboard a starship? A few months’ ‘ship time’ could mean that years had passed on Earth. The world that the crew returned to would be very different from the world that the crew had left.

The science of time dilation and space travel were not explicitly discussed in the story, but the story would have been impossible without these two concepts in the background. The plot passed my litmus test for proper science fiction: if the science were removed from the story, could the story still exist?

My goal when writing Melissa was to explore the aspects of a character’s life that are usually behind the scenes in other science-fiction stories. For example, the protagonist is the captain of a military starship, but the adventures associated with that profession are not the focus of the story. The true focus is on what the captain leaves behind each time he departs from Earth.

I considered how time dilation might affect the captain’s relationships. Would his loved ones resent his absence from their lives, or would they respect the sacrifice he’s making for the good of the planet?

An internal battle between the captain’s feelings of regret and his sense of stoic duty creates the story’s tension and conflict. He realizes that he has a responsibility to his family, but he also has a responsibility to protect the citizens of Earth. How Captain Carter Harrison has chosen to balance these responsibilities has brought him to what could be his final reunion with Melissa.

Futures this week is pleased to welcome Tom Easton and Jack McDevitt with their timely story Blood will tell. Jack previously appeared in Futures back in 2006 with a story about a US election called The candidate. In this week’s tale the pair team up to examine a remarkable business opportunity. Here they reveal the origins of the tale — as always, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Blood will tell

We all know that conferences are great places to forge collaborations. Jack and I are old friends, but it wasn’t till we were having lunch at the World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, (far from our homes in Georgia and Massachusetts) that we decided to collaborate at last. I was telling him about the recent work on infusing young plasma into old mice (stemming from older parabiosis work) and finding rejuvenating effects. I noted that researchers are looking for the ‘active ingredient’ and finding candidates. Then I offered a bet that one’s own young plasma would work better than someone else’s. He was telling me about a panel on time travel (remember: science fiction convention) he was going to be on. We looked at each other and said, “Hmmm…”

The idea that autologous plasma would work better than heterologous would not be hard to test using same and different strains of inbred mice. Testing the idea on people would take much longer. But that need not stop entrepreneurs. Just think of cryonics: the idea that freezing your body or head until whatever ails you can be cured (along with freezer burn) makes a certain amount of intuitive sense but it has never been tested. Banking your own plasma when young in the hope that it will rejuvenate you in old age has a good deal more support. In fact I’m surprised that no one has yet set up a company to do it.

Of course, now that Jack and I have described the basic business plan, we do insist on a cut of the action.

And no, we did not miss the possibility that using time travel to get your own (or a relative’s) young plasma could explain vampires.