This week, Futures welcomes Emily McCosh with her story Breathe the last bits of air. Emily is based in southern California, and you can keep up with her work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here she talks bout her inspiration for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Breathe the last bits of air

I have a short attention span for plays, where everything is long-winded, and described through dialogue — irony, I know — but there has been one that I thoroughly enjoyed. My English professor assigned Samuel Beckett, and his play Endgame, a weird and dystopian piece of work that was so far from Shakespeare and Sophocles that I couldn’t help but be pulled in by the sheer difference. The play was absolutely absurd, following the rambling, snarky sentences of two of (what seemed to be) the last people on Earth.

The style of their speech was bizarre to say the least, so of course, the assignment after reading the play was to write a few sentences emulating the dialogue of Endgame’s main characters. I wrote a full version of this story instead, wondering what it would be like to experiment with a full plot. Months later, I realized it could be a true story worth reading, and with a few tweaks and details added, it became the piece it is now.

It’s certainly one of the strangest things I’ve written. But I hope readers find just as much beauty in the strangeness as I did when reading Endgame.

This week, Futures is please to welcome M. Darusha Wehm with her story Reflections on a life story. Originally from Canada, Darusha is currently based in New Zealand where you can keep up to date with her writing on her website or by following her on Twitter. Here she offers some insight into her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Reflections on a life story

From the books of Philip K. Dick to world of The Matrix, science fiction has often questioned the authenticity of our perceived existence.

How is a memory of a dream different from any other memory? How do I know that the reality I experience is, in fact, real? What is the true nature of reality? These questions have confounded philosophers and mystics for thousands of years, just as they have sparked an entire subgenre of science fiction.

When I ponder these questions, I often wonder if it even matters whether our existence is real. It feels real; isn’t that enough? This story came out of taking that question further — what if it doesn’t feel real? What if someone’s life story felt more like fiction than biography? And what if that person got a second chance to write their story?

This week, Futures welcomes Laurence Raphael Brothers with his first-contact story between two voices talking. A writer and a technologist, Laurence can be found on the web at his home site or on Twitter. Here he discusses the ideas behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing between two voices talking

The title of this piece came from some Markov-chain word-soup provided as a prompt by the great SF writer Vylar Kaftan. Hence the use of lowercase, because it was a random fragment taken from a randomly scrambled set of paragraphs randomly combined from multiple sources. To me, the title suggested a few words overheard from someone else’s conversation, perhaps people talking about conversation itself.

So what lies between two voices? A communication gap that can be bridged, but only with empathy and insight from both speakers. Of course any sort of connection between people can be fraught with fear and uncertainty. So all that led very naturally to the idea of a first-contact story between a human and an alien who are equally fearful, equally uncertain. Since the alien has already crossed the gulf between the stars, it seems that the gulf between minds may be even more challenging to overcome.

For me the crucial section of between two voices talking comes just before the end, when Marla and the alien’s conversation blends together with similar voices, expressing similar thoughts, to the point that without dialogue tags it would be impossible to say who was speaking. Surely the achievement of a meeting of minds, a rapport based on true understanding, is the ultimate challenge for all humans, and indeed for all intelligent life.