This week’s Futures story marks the welcome return of Graham Robert Scott with Last contact. Regular readers will remember Graham’s earlier story for us in the shape of Cold comforts. When not writing short stories, Graham teaches writing at Texas Woman’s University. Here, he reveals the origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Last contact

There’s a second story to be read between the lines of Last contact, told therein through hints. When I started this piece, I hoped to capture in a knuckle of writing a fistful of forecast about how we and other occupants of this Earth might coexist at the end of this century. As a result, whole paragraphs of thought were sometimes conveyed by a word or a phrase.

A case in point: Leo walks to Lagos from where? The distance from places today inhabited by western lowland gorillas to Lagos isn’t really walkable. They’re hundreds of miles — countries — apart. The nearest gorilla species in the wild isn’t the western lowland but the Cross River gorilla, yet it is itself far south of Lagos and closer to extinction than the western lowland. But, just as the threat of climate change sometimes provokes serious conversations about geoengineering, so too does threat of species extinction encourage serious conversations about radical rescue strategies. One such extreme is translocation — moving a critically endangered species to another territory. Like geoengineering, translocation is a solution virtually guaranteed to cascade into new problems, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen, particularly as a changing climate shifts rainfall patterns. Meanwhile, desperation has led many conservationists to embrace species tourism as a way to raise funds that can help animals recover.

Last contact depicts a world where gorilla tourism has helped the western lowland gorilla, but where the rarer, shy Cross River didn’t really have that option. It also assumes that, in the final years of the Cross River gorilla, Nigeria and Cameroon adopted and translocated western lowland gorillas partly to spread them out in the face of unpredictable climate change and partly to draw on western-lowland tourism for Cross River funding. I never did pin down an exact location for Leo’s home, but imagined it being about the same distance from the city as Nigeria’s Lekki Conservation Centre. I did briefly toy around with the idea of having Leo be a Cross River gorilla, and I adore the idea we might still have them around in 80 years. But when it came to writing the story, I just couldn’t force myself to be that optimistic. And so, in the future depicted in Last contact, the Cross River gorilla exists only in memory and video.

In this week’s Futures story, Beth Cato plunges us into the secret world of the Gourmando Resistance. As well as cooking up guerrilla podcasts, Beth is the author of The Clockwork Dagger duology and Blood of Earth trilogy. You can find out more about her writing (and her baking) at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the recipe for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The 133rd Live Podcast of the Gourmando Resistance

This story arose from two great joys of life: a Codex flash-fiction contest and churros.

Codex is a forum for neo-pro writers that hosts regular contests for its members. As novels have taken over my life in recent years, I’ve been producing fewer short stories. Codex’s contests inspire me to keep writing short works and keep them on submission.

In this particular contest, five prompts went out on a Friday, with a 1,000-word maximum story due the following Tuesday. Two of the prompts resonated with me: to write about a hunter, and to write about one thing in the world I want to change that could go horribly wrong.

So, naturally, my brain went to hunting down new food sensations as part of a future resistance movement. (My brain is weird like that.)

I’m an unabashed foodie. I maintain a weekly food blog called Bready or Not through BethCato.com. Many of my novels and stories explore the emotional and cultural importance of food; my past Nature story Bread of Life is probably one of my best examples of that.

My foremost issue was picking the food to centre my story around. The dish needed to be prepared quickly for the sake of the flash-fiction format, and I wanted something with cultural significance. Churros — those scrumptious doughy sticks coated with cinnamon and sugar — immediately came to mind. A few years ago, I was part of a foodie-writer group blog effort called the Holy Taco Church, wherein my official title was High Priestess of Churromancy. As part of my duties, I developed a series of churro-inspired recipes.

Writing this story gave me an opportunity to wield my High Priestess powers again and examine churros in a new and rebellious way.

Read more Futures stories by Beth:

Powers of observation | Excerpts from the 100-day food diary of Angela Meyer | The human is late to feed the cat | Bread of life | Post-apocalyptic conversations with a sidewalk | Canopy of skulls

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome Dave Kavanaugh with his story The Congress. Based in the Netherlands, Dave will publish his first novel, Age of Omicron, in October. You find out more about his work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the political machinations that gave rise to his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The Congress

My first draft of any story tends to be a bloated mess of sloppy world-building and overly detailed character backstory. With each additional editing pass, I carve away the story’s fat and gristle to find its true substance. In the case of The Congress, I realized what I wanted to do first and foremost was tell an idea story, almost like those of Asimov and Clarke. Specifically, the piece strives to answer — or at least to ask — two basic questions:

Are the qualities that make someone electable in a modern democracy ever synonymous with the qualities of a good leader?

and…

If a political system works, does it matter if it’s based on deception?

I composed my original draft of The Congress several years ago when these questions were more or less academic for me. The first question pertained to the machine’s curiosity and the second was reflected in Mari’s inner conflict. When I recently dug up the story to edit it afresh and submit it to Nature, I found that both questions had taken on new meaning and import.

In the midst of rising political tension and populism movements around the globe, a tale of AI government gone right sounds optimistic indeed. This is not to say that there aren’t ‘Mari’s in real life. I’ve no doubt there are dedicated, hard-working, intelligent civic workers who would take pride not only in achieving high rank, but in enacting positive change in the world. But in the cut-throat reality show of modern politics, can we hope that such an individual can come out on top? If recent high-profile elections are any indication, that seems increasingly unlikely. So even as AI technology advances and the possibility of thinking machine leadership becomes less and less improbable, one wonders if the type of power-hungry individual able to fight their way into a position of authority would ever give up that power and replace the very system that enabled them to succeed.

As for governments based on deception, I think many people have come to believe this is already a reality, leading some to abandon hope and others to embrace activism. Perhaps AI government could appeal to both groups. I think the more interesting question (at least from the point of view of an author obsessed with character motivation) is if the real-life Mari’s have the same reaction when they finally reach the positions to which they aspire. Do they face the same choice Mari did in the story, having to either turn and run from their dreams or else sacrifice their values and drink poisons of their own? At least in The Congress the system she sacrifices herself to is a system that works.

As these ideas ping-ponged around my mind, I considered them through the POV of a character that interested me. The result was the final version of The Congress.

In the end, the tone of The Congress might be bittersweet but the message is clearly hopeful. I guess only time will tell whether this optimistic little story is prophetic science fiction, or else pure fantasy. In the meantime, I suspect many of us would gladly hand the reins of political power over to an Atari 800 rather than put up with our present leadership. Pong/Pac-Man 2020, anyone?

This week, Futures finds itself plunged into a post-apocalyptic world courtesy of Stewart C. Baker’s latest story, Failsafes. Regular readers will remember that Stewart has previously introduced us to the delights of the quantum disambiguator and the role of relativity in the course of true love. Here, he reveals the disaster-related origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Failsafes

In Failsafes, a scavenger in a post-apocalyptic future finds a hidden cache with long-lost technology that just might be the key to making people’s lives better — starting with her own.

I’ve long been interested in the idea of longevity and decay. Stories about long-dead civilizations and what comes after appeal to me, as do those about the vast reaches between stars and galaxy-scale civilizations. Think N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle stories, James Tiptree Jr’s The Man Who Walked Home or Asimov’s Foundation novels.

Of course, as a librarian, I have a professional interest in failsafes like the ones in my story. That’s because those section headers — with a little tweaking — actually come from a presentation about decentralized data preservation I attended at a library conference. In the presentation, given by Danielle Robinson of Code for Science and Society, there are ways to provide better and longer-term access to information with Open Science, Open Access and other cool librarian-things like that. I think they make a pretty useful list to limit the inevitable post-apocalypse, as well!

Long before I was a science-fiction writer or a librarian, I was fascinated by the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit organization established, per their website, to “provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common”. Among their initiatives? Adding a 0 in front of the calendar year, so that 1996, the year of their founding, becomes 01996. Building a clock that will tell the time in centuries, and last 10,000 years, with a cuckoo springing out once a millennium. Creating a modern-day Rosetta Stone.

Although their mission seems quixotic, it’s one that appeals to me. Partly that’s just my reptilian hind-brain speaking, I’m sure. Feeding me little whispers: “The things you do matter.” “Nothing you do will be lost.” Behind that, though, is a serious question: what would civilization be like today if people hundreds — or thousands — of years ago had been more responsible? What will civilization be like in the future if we aren’t more responsible ourselves?

As Danny Hillis, inventor of the 10,000 year clock, puts it: “I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me.”

I like to think that in Failsafes, too, the real lesson is not: “Make technology last so we can rebuild civilization if it fails!” but: “Care. Never stop caring.”