This week, Futures is heading back to school thanks to My favourite sentience, the latest story by Marissa Lingen. Regular readers will already know Marissa’s work as we have been fortunate enough to publish some of her other stories (a full list can be found 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 My favourite sentience

Some of my writer friends talk on Twitter about their favourite sentences. I’m not usually that kind of writer. It’s not that I never have satisfying sentences, it’s that I’m always more concerned with what I’m about to do than with what I just did. So when someone asks me for a favourite sentence of mine, I’m a bit lost. However. There was a typo in someone’s tweet, and I was off to the races.

Kids are often being asked their favourite of this or that. Your favourite animal, for example, or your favourite fruit. As an adult, this seems a bit silly to me: surely a pear that’s perfectly in season is better than raspberries that are out of season, and in a few months it will be reversed. And yet at the same time, they have to practise writing paragraphs on something, and the things in their immediate surroundings make a lot of sense.

So for this story, I remembered one well-meaning teacher who asked about our favourite music and exposed fault lines she had no idea were there, all over a classroom of pre-pubescent children. And I started thinking: the immediate surroundings of children of the future would be very very different. And of course there was that typo…

Other Futures stories by Marissa Lingen

Seven point two | 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 pleased to welcome Tomás McMahon with his story Wasteland of sand and ice. Tomás is an A-level student in England, but he kindly took some time out from his studies to reveal more about the inspiration for his tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Wasteland of sand and ice

An alien walks out of his UFO to make first contact and immediately dies of asphyxiation. Owing to a miscalculation of the landing site’s solidity, its descent had thrown up more dust than predicted, blocking the visitor’s respiratory apparatus, and resulting in suffocation.

It always struck me as absurd as to why extraterrestrials are depicted as arriving at Earth in person — or rather in alien in this instance — with no prior unmanned — or rather … OK, I’ve already made that joke — missions. A total of 44 satellites and rovers have been sent to Mars and, as of yet, not one human. Why would an alien be any different and travel halfway across the Galaxy before something expendable told them it was safe?

In his TED talk on the future of aerospace engineering, Burt Rutan quipped that the reason NASA found no life on Mars was because they kept landing in the deserts. That got me thinking: what conditions would be required for an alien probe to believe Earth to be similarly uninhabited? The results of my thought experiment manifested themselves in Wasteland of sand and ice.

‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ To my understanding, what Oppenheimer meant when he recounted his viewing of the world’s first atomic blast was that the human race had achieved a level of power previously only reserved for the gods of legend. In my final rewrites of Wasteland, I wanted the only characters in the story to be autonomous robots, like the one Earth had incorrectly identified as a meteoroid. I decided these robots should be satellites, whose military prowess was on the level of divine, and hence took the names of the Slavic, Chinese and Taíno native North American thunder gods, respectively. Although deities may be at home more in high fantasy than science fiction, I think it’s appropriate that the nations in Wasteland unanimously looked for divine intervention when they were in crisis.

By my bed, I have a Sony Cube Clock Radio, which is 24-hour and digital. In 2018, before I go to sleep, I have to set the time I want to wake up the next day, however, soon I expect clocks will be calculating this time for me. From the abolishment of serfdom and slavery to cars and chatbots, autonomy is an aspect of life that is more prevalent than ever before. Even though I have to admit it’s unlikely that military satellites running on artificial intelligence will be in orbit and operational by 2037, it’s undoubtable that this trend is set to continue.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome back S. R. Algernon, who returns with a fresh take on how to run a country in e-PLURIBUS. Regular readers will know that S. R. Algernon has written several stories for Futures before (a full list is at the foot of this post). You can keep up to date with his latest work by visiting his website or following him on Twitter. Here he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing e-PLURIBUS

The origin for this story was rather straightforward. I received a jury summons at one point and reflected on the fact that a group of ordinary people make decisions about the guilt or innocence of a defendant, rather than leaving the decision up to a judge. Considering the challenge of running a country, and the need for a president to represent the people, I thought of a collective presidency that reflected the life experience and thoughts of a sample of the country’s citizens. Once I had the main concept in mind, I thought about how the selection process might work and the problems that might arise. The approach was similar to the one I took in We’ll Always Have Sybaris, published in Daily Science Fiction (30 November 2015). I tried to make the story general enough so that it could apply to any country with an executive branch of government, rather than commenting on any specific president.

Other Futures stories by S. R. Algernon

A time for peace | Planetary defences | Cargo cult | A pocket full of phlogiston | The chains of plenty | Asymmetrical warfare | In a new light | One slow step for man | Genius loci | Legacy admissions | In Cygnus and in Hell | The palimpsest planet

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Christine Lucas with her story Requiem. A former Air Force officer from Greece, Christine has written for a variety of publications. Here, she reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Requiem

Requiem was born from my partner’s fascination with the ancient astronaut theory. After watching one documentary too many about how aliens built the pyramids, my mind started to wonder. If aliens did visit Earth in the distant past, is that all they did? Built things and conversed with kings and sages? But what if they did more, some of them? What if there were some odd ones who liked to mingle with the primitives for reasons other than exchanging bodily fluids (and, apparently, DNA)?  Some of them might even be foodies and develop a fondness for Terran cuisine.

And perhaps some of them strayed a little too far from the mothership, and learnt a thing or two on their journey.

Scent and taste can stir up long-forgotten memories and powerful emotions. And so, Requiem became the story of one final pilgrimage to a place of life-shaping experiences before launching off to the next level of existence and a whole new adventure.