This week Futures finds Marissa Lingen exploring s novel angle on extraterrestrial contact in her story Seven point two. Regular readers will know Marissa’s work (for the uninitiated, a list of her other Futures stories is at the foot of this post). If you’d like to explore her universe further, you should head to her website or follow her on Twitter. Here, Marissa reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Seven point two

What would you tell an alien civilization, if you knew that you were communicating at light speed and wouldn’t have a chance to hear their response?

Hello, we’re here, you’re not alone, we’re intelligent too — at least sort of intelligent. Here’s some stuff we’ve figured out. Here’s who we are.

Well … who exactly is who we are?

Astronomers have been talking about this for generations. We’ve tried various techniques and signals, images, codes, numbers. I know a lot of nerds of various kinds, though, and most of them have a sort of offbeat sense of humour.

So why wouldn’t their alien counterparts?

The fundamental constants of the Universe are pretty serious business, and like everything else that’s pretty serious business, sometimes you have to take them with a little bit of a light touch.

Other Futures stories by Marissa Lingen

Planet of the five rings | Running safety tips for humans| The most important thing | The many media hypothesis | Boundary waters | Maxwell’s Demon went down to Georgia | The stuff we don’t do | Unsolved logistical problems in time travel: spring semester | Entanglement | Quality control | Search strings | Alloy

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Preston Grassmann, with his latest story Clocking out. Regular readers will remember Preston’s earlier stories, which have collectively taken us to the Cathedral of time, the vermilion market, Venice, Version 9.0 and shown us broken maps of the sea. By day, Preston is a contributing editor for Locus Magazine, and you can keep up with him by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Clocking out

There is a growing number of Futurists, as opposed to Singularitarians (an actual movement defined by its belief in the high probability of super-intelligence and the benefits obtained by it), who believe that extreme mental enhancements will be fraught with social and existential risks.  

Clocking out started with that basic premise in mind and the image of a company town (called fast-towns) divided into eight levels of overclocking. The zones are designed to acclimatize the individual to increasing levels of mental enhancement. Within each fast-town, there are time-zone shifts, where clock-speed moves in relation to mental overclocking (degrees of change) and subjective perception. This is a story about one possible consequence of such a world.  

This week, Futures has been enticed into the world of gastronomy, courtesy of M. J. Pettit’s story Chocolate chicken cheesecake. Now, that may sound like an unusual combination, but there’s s good reason for the recipe. When not dreaming up culinary delights, M. J. is an academic and writer who divides his time between Toronto, Canada, and Manchester, UK. Here, he reveals the origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Chocolate chicken cheesecake

This story began with a dinnertime conversation (of course). A friend mentioned a recent attempt to train a neural network on the recipes found on food blogs and the inedible concoctions it subsequently devised. The plot pretty much came to me whole at that moment as I contemplated the ‘what next’.

In much of my writing, both historical and fictional, I tend towards the absurd, tracing the unanticipated afterlives of science and technology. As I wrote the story, an insight from literary critic Frederic Jameson kept recurring: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”

A number of prominent technologists have revived concerns about the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. These anxieties about automation are hardly new, but in this story, I wanted to read them against a newer set of concerns. I sympathize with social critics who argue that the technologists’ vision of an AI apocalypse is misplaced. The more imminent and invisible danger, according to these critics, is how Silicon Valley transmits many of its shared biases onto our posthuman brethren. We are producing AI that replicates and often enhances our prejudices and inequalities.

That the end of the world comes from the narcissistic tendencies of a reality TV star speaks more to the power of the unconscious over my writerly imagination than to the predictive capacities of the historian.

In this week’s Futures, Anna Zumbro returns to visit A street but half made up. Anna previously introduced us to an unusual cultural experience in The Museum of Nothing. You can find out more about Anna’s work at her website and by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing A street but half made up

One of my favourite things to spot in any city is a Little Free Library — typically a small, house-shaped box with a clear front to display the books inside. Anyone can borrow or leave a book and then go on with their day, now brightened by an impromptu library visit.

I like e-books for their convenience, but I feel that there’s something uniquely satisfying about print. Turning pages, moving bookmarks, and reading other people’s margin notes on used copies are all important parts of the reading experience for me. Many readers agree: in both the United States and Great Britain, e-book sales have fallen while print sales have climbed. As a teacher, I’ve heard my tech-savvy students weigh the pros and cons of print and digital text, and have learnt that they too feel that screens are not always superior to paper.

In this story, I wanted to explore a futuristic setting that I’d enjoy visiting, one in which new and old technologies coexist and every day involves travelling through a library.

As we usher in a new year, Futures is pleased to welcome James Anderson with his story, Universal Parking, Inc. James is professor of cognitive science at Brown University.  He read science fiction from an early age and desperately wanted to be the first human to discover a clam shell on Mars.  He has written many scientific papers and several books, most recently After Digital (Oxford, 2017), which discusses brain-like computing and how computer hardware of any kind determines what you can compute with it. Here, he reveals what inspired his tale for Futures — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Universal Parking, Inc.

This short short story is my first attempt at writing science fiction.

I have been reading science fiction in large quantities since I was in elementary school in the 1950s.  At that time, before megablockbuster movies and video games, science fiction was minor genre fiction, widely disparaged, a very guilty pleasure.

However, science fiction determined my career.  Among my favourite science fiction, both then and now, was Asimov’s Foundation series, which I read multiple times.  I wanted to be Hari Seldon, a ‘psychohistorian’ at the centre of the series.  A psychohistorian used tools taken from psychology and mathematics to predict the future course of human history.  Seldon predicted the imminent decline and fall of his contemporary Galactic Empire causing him no end of political problems.  In the books, Seldon’s difficulties were mingled with Asimov’s dazzling scientific extrapolation.

I knew what I wanted to do with my life.  But when it came time to go to college, I looked at many college catalogues and found no majors in psychohistory.  I decided I would have to construct my own programme, combining physics and neuroscience, leading directly to what I have done professionally ever since.

Even though it is short, my Futures story weaves together several strands including a tiny bit of psychohistory.  Parking is indeed an academic problem.  The physics is vaguely plausible.  Easy, rapid shifts between universes are highly unlikely.  More realistic is the ‘history’ thread.  When two societies first make contact, the agents are not necessarily the best of the breed.  Early explorers were often of dubious character, escaping problems at home and looking for a quick buck.  Contacts in North America between Europeans and Native Americans provide many sad examples.  I liked Western movies as well as science fiction when I was young. A major recurrent theme both in movies and historical reality was: “White man speak with forked tongue.”  So do parking scammers.

Every time a new and glamorous technology appears, the fraudsters are near the first wave.  Railroads beget stock-market manipulators.  Expensive miracle drugs beget fake expensive miracle drugs.  Computers beget hackers.

So what would happen when a couple of naive academics meet an interuniversal scammer?  Not much doubt who is going to lose.  Fortunately, though improbably, as in Westerns, a good guy appears at the last minute and saves the protagonists from their folly.  A learning experience, perhaps.

When I wrote this piece, I was in the process of buying a car. I find car names fascinating because they are chosen with great care and sometimes achieve genuine poetry.  Think of the associations of ‘Mustang’ or ‘Firebird Trans Am’.  A different universe would have a different poetry with different referents.