This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Griffin Ayaz Tyree with his story Surrogate. Based in San Diego, Griffin is a psychiatry-bound medical student (when he’s not writing sci-fi). You can find out more about him by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the creative process behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Surrogate

When I sit down to write — which I don’t do nearly as much as I’d like to — I often find my stories revolve around themes of death and grieving. Part of that is professional: I spent a great deal of the past two years rotating through a large hospital system. As one can imagine, with the quality of medical care as it is, the vast majority of patients recover. Very few patients die — but some extremely ill people skirt the boundary between life and death for a time. Many more receive diagnoses that mean the end of their lives as they know it, and have to grieve for a part of themselves. And always on the wards, there’s an understanding that death and illness are inescapable parts of life itself. I suppose that makes everything else more precious.

Another part of my fixation on morbid themes is personal: my father recently passed away after a long illness. And I have not known grief to be a neat linear path, with a clear beginning and end. I’ve known it to be a wet, snaking thing that seeps into the heart and bubbles up in spurts at the most bizarre provocations: an old e-mail or a catch of song.

But what if we never had to grieve? That’s the question at the heart of Surrogate.

Science fiction is fertile ground for ideas about delaying, or even preventing, human death. The one that figures prominently in Surrogate is the connectome: a digital map of neural connections in the human brain, theoretically able to preserve someone’s consciousness post-mortem. It’s a fascinating concept, and even if it were feasible in its current form (it’s not), it would raise a slew of deeply existential questions — among them, is a digital copy equivalent to the real thing? Or is there no ‘real’ thing beyond a pattern of thought?

A lot of ink has been spilled (er, printed) grappling with those issues, with no clear resolution. So in the absence of any certainty that ‘we’ would persist after an upload, is the goal of connectomics to preventing our own non-existence at the time of death, or to comfort the living — to prevent them from ever having to confront the reality of death? That’s the central theme I wanted to explore.

Secondarily, I wanted to imagine how a society where mind-uploading is commonplace would rearrange itself, socially and economically. There are shades of gig mentality, customer service and spirit possession stitched together into the titular profession. Admittedly, I projected a major struggle of many health-care providers (especially those who work in intensive care settings) onto the narrator — namely, for someone regularly exposed to matters of life and death, the act of balancing the emotional weight of their experiences with the need to function.

So there you have it; a bit of a thematic mash-up, but in any case I hope it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read!

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Kurt Pankau with his apocalyptic story Papa Bear. Although he is based in St Louis, Missouri, you can also find him on the web, either at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Papa Bear

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Grace Tang with her story Your face. Regular readers will remember Grace’s earlier pieces, which included Okami, Time heals all wounds, Ghost in the machine, White lies and Man’s best friend. You can find out more about what Grace is up to by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the inspiration for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Your face

My inspiration for this story came amid the flurry of excitement (and accompanying paranoia) around being able to reconstruct faces using nothing but DNA.

Although our current ability to do so has, as usual, been blown way out of proportion by mainstream media, I wondered what we’d do with this power once we actually wielded it. I imagine we’d first get important things out of the way, like finding out what Jesus really looked like. But once DNA facial reconstruction got to the point where it was commonplace, like today’s direct-to-consumer genetic test kits, what would we use it for? How would it be abused? What kinds of genetic crimes could be committed if people could not only steal your genetic information, but also steal your face?

Another element in the story — the rarity of the victim’s green eyes — was inspired by another piece of genetics news, that light-coloured eyes are becoming less common. I grew up surrounded by people with eyes and hair that were uniformly dark brown to black, so moving to the United States and encountering people with light-coloured eyes and hair up close was like seeing a unicorn in real life for the first time. As the world becomes a smaller place, and eye pigment proteins mix together like dark paint poured into tins of pastels and golds, I wonder how soon light eyes will indeed become a rare, near-mythical phenomenon.

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Matt Thompson with his story Ded-Mek. Based in London, Matt is also a musician — you can find out more about his work on his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Ded-Mek

The idea for Ded-Mek came from a feeling that futurologists and tech marketers often ignore the psychological impact of emergent technologies in their quest for ever-shinier visions. There’s an implicit assumption that humans will adjust to a changing world in a benign, rational manner.

The reality, of course, is vastly different, and always has been. The historical shift away from a religious worldview has, in many ways, led to a kind of techno-paganism, an overlay of spiritual concerns onto the increasingly science-fictional landscape we live in. Most people (myself included) have little idea of how the machines that rule their lives actually work.

Cloning and other forms of genetic manipulation take us ever further into an uncertain future of data-driven facsimiles, mirror-image promises of ultimate perfection. For those whose psychic barriers are less armoured than some the consequences can be profound. Pathological obsessions and compulsions, a broken recital of grief and anxiety, bubble beneath the surface of many lives. If the temptation to remodel the human form in our own image is there, then how might a person already walking the thin line of sanity respond?

The titular character of the story becomes trapped in an ever-expanding loop of delayed emotional closure. The search for the ideal becomes an end in itself. Were she ever to succeed in her quest to remake her lost son she would have no choice but to face up to her own sickness, a confrontation that she could only win by destroying her creation and starting again. After all, where is there left to go when you have, finally, become God?