This week, Futures is delving into the world of life after death courtesy of Masques by Mike Adamson. When not writing about the future, Mike can be found lecturing about anthropology — you can find out more about his work at his website. Here, he reveals the inspiration for his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Masques

Masques is a story that developed from a number of ideas. Extended life has been a fascination of mine for many, many years and has a long pedigree in science fiction — it was a favourite topic of Lester del Rey back in the 1950s, for instance, then came Robert Silverberg’s Recalled to Life and, much later, Greg Bear’s concept of ‘city memory’ as a post-mortem personality upload. The current generation of scientific work holds out all sorts of possibilities hinting at some realization of ancient dreams and hopes, so pushing affairs a couple of centuries into the future opens many doors.

Robotics are advancing fast enough to scare people, the problems of an interface between electronics and living tissue are being solved, cloning of whole organisms has been done, we can 3D print body parts — all seem to be pointing towards a revolution in both medicine and, consequently, notions of life and death. Scanning out the personality from the physical brain remains the greater imponderable, therefore the ‘fiction’ in the science, but given that element, the rest seems to be promising future tech.

It would be comforting to think an extra lease of life awaited us, beyond even radical physical destruction. Exploring this through the less-than-honourable medium of inappropriate transcription of the personality for material gain produces a familiar scenario. In itself, this gives one pause to roll the eyes and wonder if human nature really is immutable. Social evolution towards some philosophic ideal may be laudable but history teaches us we’re more interested in gadgets, in the main, than self-improvement. Extraction of the personality and download into some synthetic chassis may be the ultimate expression of the human obsession with ‘gadgetology’.  This is Ghost in the Shell taken to production-line capacity, which, given automated construction and 3D printing, is hardly impossible.

But, despite the apprehension many will justifiably feel at these concepts, I can’t help seeing the good side of it. Experience a different body every day? Certainly. Access skill suites you never had before? Comes with the territory, not even an optional extra. Be impervious to the onslaught of the years as well? That’s the nature of the beast. Living in a transcribed state could theoretically open the entire corpus of human experience to each and every individual, and that has to be worth serious consideration.

This week, Futures enters the world of romance courtesy of DNA exchange by D. A. Xiaolin Spires. Somehow, we suspect that, as a result, keepsakes are never going to be the same… You can find out more about D. A. Xiaolin Spires at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the secrets of her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing DNA exchange

Lockets with photos. Locks of hairs. Promise rings. There are many ways to show your undying love to your next infatuation (or lifelong partner[s]), but what better way to forge a bond than to share a sensorial experience in addition to a piece of your own flesh and skin?

With advances in technology where human ears can be grown on arms, harvested and replanted on the head, I thought, why stop at the cosmetic? Why stop at keeping these ‘very intimate pieces of yourself’ at yourself? If human life is very much about social experience and sharing, then I could envision nothing short of taking this intimate chunk of your own flesh and gifting it to another, letting the object of your desire dangle a literal object, er, organ, from their own necks.

Not only are we humans so good at forging ties through the acts of giving, receiving and exchange of material things, but more and more we’ve shared somatic and sensorial experiences, living in the same realms through virtual worlds and augmented realities. We hear the phantom echoes of each other’s worlds through video chat and we bridge distances by keeping our separation-minimizing portals (our cell phones) near to our skin. I can imagine a future where people kick it up a notch and keep literal skin and organs as separation-minimizing portals, hearing and seeing the worlds we encompass, always having a way back to each other through fragments of our carnal selves.

In my writing, I explore the idiosyncratic, the strange and the bizarre — in the near and far future — and take our everyday behaviour and customs, including courtship practices, and stretch them out to see where they might (and probably will?) go. Maybe in the future — beyond courtship and into the realm of all sorts of relationships — writers and storytellers can distribute their literal lips, as disposable and ubiquitous as (soon-to-be-outdated) USB drives, and have these DNA encoded self-fragments talk directly to their readers, literal mouthpieces of the future!

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Filip Wiltgren with his latest story, When Nain came to Shirin’s door. By day, Filip is a mild-mannered communication officer at Linköping University, where he also teaches communication and presentation skills at a post-graduate level. But by night, he turns into a frenzied ten-fingered typist, clawing out jagged stories of fantasy and science fiction, which have found lairs in places such as Analog, Grimdark, Daily SF and Nature Futures. Filip roams the Swedish highlands, kept in check by his wife and kids. He can be found at www.wiltgren.com or you can follow him on Twitter. Here, he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing When Nain came to Shirin’s door

I’m slightly ashamed to say that I stole the plot for When Nain came to Shirin’s door. But only slightly, because I stole it from Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War.

The Forever War, in case you haven’t read it (and a shocking number of people haven’t these days) is an amazing hard SF novel, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It, together with John Steakley’s Armor, and Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, laid the basis for all my military-themed fiction.

The Forever War is to SF what Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is to Vietnam War movies — a gritty, down to earth, bloody and ruthless story which is, first and foremost, about people. And if The Forever War is FMJ, then Armor is Das Boot, a dark, alien movie where the machine is in the centre and the soldiers are as much its prisoners as its masters. And Starship Troopers is, well, a teenage coming-of-age military power fantasy. And if you don’t agree then we can step out in the alley behind the pub and discuss it.

To tell the truth, I wasn’t aware that I was stealing the plot of The Forever War. When Nain came to Shirin’s door came about as I was reading about the whole Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies debate about where science fiction was going, and I realized that my own SF was, to quote James Cameron, very “male, stale and pale”.

Because while reading about Flash Gordon pulping Emperor Ming might be fun, it’s much more fun to see Emperor Ming getting whopped by Hyralva Kanye, a 42-year-old soccer mom whose prime attributes include steadiness under fire, an endless tolerance for stress, and a penchant for nerd-rage. It’s simply fresh. And yes, that’s a blatant call for more diversity in science fiction, and if you don’t agree with that, the alley behind the pub has been freshly swept and sanded.

So I started Door with the names Nain and Shirin, and rolled from there. The outcome wasn’t planed as I tend to write into the dark and make everything up as I go along, but I’m happy with the way it turned out, and it’s one of my favourite stories.

However, I will have to, as we say in Sweden, throw a boot at it. Because just as with Haldeman’s Forever War and many other time-dilation stories, Door doesn’t adequately take into account the speed of technological progress. And if you don’t agree with that, then we’ll have to agree to disagree, because the pub owner has built a professional debating ring and I’m afraid that more arguments would endanger my amateur status for the next Worldcon shout-o-lympics.

In this week’s Futures story, Andrea Kriz takes a musical approach with Piano concerto for new hands. Regular readers will remember Andrea’s previous stories Chrysalis and The coded messenger. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Piano concerto for new hands

In February, I heard Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand for the first time. I’d been reluctant to listen to the piece before then. Growing up playing piano, no composer left as much of a mark on me as Ravel. Both physically and mentally (I once bled over the keyboard after cutting my finger on a glissando in his piece Jeux d’eau). Because of that, along with the concerto’s backstory — Ravel writing the piece for a pianist who’d lost his arm in the First World War — I thought it’d be painful to listen to. I was both right and wrong. It’s true that from the first swells of strings that filled the concert hall I felt tension, from the outbursts of piano, loss and anger almost bordering on desperation — but intertwined with that were reflective interludes, a jazzy playfulness, and in the last cadenza — triumph.

I’d been working on idea about an amputee, inspired by a lot of anime and video games I’d experienced with similar characters, like Violet Evergarden, Fullmetal Alchemist and Metal Gear Solid V. I was having trouble because I knew that at the end Cygnus decides to walk away from the military, despite really believing it’s his true calling, despite being given prosthetics that were essentially identical to his original limbs. But I couldn’t understand why. I heard Ravel’s Piano Concerto for Left Hand … and that piece fell into place.