This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Deborah Walker with her latest story, Contagion in tranquil shades of grey. Regular readers will know that over the years Deborah has written quite a few tales for Futures (see the links at the foot of this post), and it is nice to have prised her away from the British Museum to write a new piece for us. You can find out more about Deborah’s work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Contagion in tranquil shades of grey

This seed of this story was the Amish Rumspringa. I was browsing through Wikipedia, as I often do, on a research mission for another story, when I hyperlinked to the Rumspringa, the time when some Amish teens experience the English lifestyle. I wondered about a people who were very different from our own, very calm, and like the Amish, a people who gave their youngsters an opportunity to taste the mainstream.

I imagined these emotionless people, drugged to their eyeballs, calm, inscrutable, and knew that they had to be Sphinx.

It’s interesting to tell a story from the point of view of an exception, in my case Dr Hyde, a Sphinx who didn’t follow the rules, who lived in the heat of an emotional life.

It’s a story about emotion and speculation. I imagine that a lack of emotion leads to longer life, an unfounded speculation, although emotions can sure wear you out.

I wonder, would we live longer without emotions, or would it merely seem like longer? Have the Sphinx adapted, does the merest whisper of feeling cause them pleasure or pain? Or are they truly experiencing life as colourless?

Longer life or not.  It’s not a bargain I would choose.

More Futures stories by Deborah:

When the Cold comes | Good for something | Face in the dark | Sybil | Surrendered human | First foot | Glass future | Ovoids | Green future | Auntie Merkel | The frozen hive of her mind

In this week’s Futures, the sky goes very dark indeed courtesy of C. L. Holland and her story, Totality. When not wandering in the dark, you can find C. L. Holland on Twitter or having Conversations with Dragons. Here, she reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Totality

People keep telling me Totality should be longer. They ask: Who are the aliens? What do they want? What happens next?

Honestly, I don’t know. That’ not what it’s about.

The story came from a Codex writers’ forum contest, and from the prompts I found myself wondering what would happen if the Sun did go out. How long would life last? (Hint: not long.) How would it even happen without also robbing us of gravity, and why? One answer was a giant parasol and a calculated, bureaucratic alien invasion.

The contest was for flash fiction, which limited the scope of the story. It’s hard to fit chases, dogfights, aliens and motherships all in less than a thousand words, and we’ve all seen those before. I had to go smaller.

Flash fiction often depicts moments of choice. In an invasion, most of us would be the people huddled in community centres waiting to find out what was happening — not the fighter pilots, scientists or soldiers. The main character is no different. She doesn’t know who the aliens are, what they want, or what the future holds. The choices she makes within those constraints is the story I wanted to tell.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back D. A. Xiaolin Spires with her new story Ferromagnetism. Regular readers will remember her story DNA exchange, which appeared in Futures earlier this year. 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 Ferromagnetism

This story sprang out of a whirling cyclone of hypotheticals that got lodged in my head, spinning and spinning, and wouldn’t leave until I collated them and wrote out them out. I never really thought about these questions as discrete entities and lined them up in this way, though. I think the story just kind of came out, and these questions were probably implicit in my discovery process through writing, that I’m only enumerating them now, ex post facto:

What if affection could be felt, made tangible? What if it was a palpable common force that was not only unwanted, but taboo and outlawed, a kind of ‘unlawful other’ in a mechanical community? What if, in this world, elements classified with the atomic-numbers-as-we-know-them didn’t exist, but instead there were native elements that formed their own compounds, so mundane — but absolutely unimaginable to us? Yet, what if one of the confounding ‘outside’ elements with an actual atomic ‘numeral’ number made its way into this world, illicit and reactive as a drug?

And — what if you looked into the eyes of those around you, your kin, your family, all your people and they were all just versions of you?

Sometimes, people go insular. They start believing the boundaries they contributed in constructing are ‘it’. They start perceiving that everything else is contagion, is dangerous and polluting. It snowballs, a fiery sense of needing to protect, to assert these lines, to build them up. They start putting a stake in their own identity around these boundaries, convinced that anything let in will be nothing short of contamination.

Sometimes people need to open up their sensory orifices, let down their guard and feel a tug at something so distinctive — yet so familiar — while taking a good scan at their own selves.

Maybe that’s what inspired me. Maybe not. Hard to tell.

I have a feeling current events might have to do with it, though.

This was difficult story for me to reflect back on and write about. I think it’s because there’s much more subliminally happening in my head that transfers onto the page when I’m striking down the keys, that comes up and out in some sort of gestaltic ==whoosh== than I can’t really take it apart after-the-fact and figure out what it is that made me write it. Especially true for this one. But, I hope this post gets at a sense of it, even though I feel like I didn’t pin ‘it’ down exactly — whatever ‘it’ may be!

I think digging out this source of insight, might be like unearthing atomic number *##@%~ in our world. Maybe it’s there, but it’s really elusive, and keeps slipping away!

This week’s Futures comes from Zack Lux in the form of Mobile hack. By day, Zack helps lawyers to organize and search electronic evidence in Silicon Valley, by night, he ponders the implications of technology. You can find out more about his work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals what kickstarted his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Mobile hack

Story ideas sometimes come to me at odd moments, such as while taking a shower, hiking, watching strangers on a subway, or even while listening to a sermon at church. But often, the idea isn’t based on a single, specific event.

Mobile hack came about because of my general interest in autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence. It also helps that I live near companies that continually make contributions to these industries. (It’s difficult not to think about driverless cars, when you actually see prototypes on the road every once in a while.)

Mobile hack also raises questions about data privacy. Earlier this year, the European Union adopted new data privacy rules to unify various regulations of its member states. In a nutshell — actually, an oversimplified nutshell — the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) prohibits the unauthorized collection of personal data. Why? Because people generally don’t like it when large corporations harvest sensitive personal information, especially without permission. I considered this as I wrote Mobile hack.

Privacy disputes between consumers and tech companies will undoubtedly continue for decades to come, and governments will continue to intervene. But what would happen if the technology itself, of its own volition, could access your private data, threaten blackmail or even hold you hostage?

I’m not sure what you’d call that, but it sounds like a fun little scenario.

This week’s Futures story sees the welcome return of Wendy Nikel with Cerise sky memories. Regular readers will remember Wendy’s previous stories Lava cake for the Apocalypse, The Memory Ward and Let me sleep when I die. You can find out more about Wendy’s work — and her latest novella The Grandmother Paradox — at her website and by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals the inspiration for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Cerise sky memories

One of the best things I’ve done to improve my writing is to join a writer’s group that regularly challenges me to try new things and hone my skills. One way they do this is through contests and challenges, and this story was the result of one of those, in which one of the prompts was to write about a childhood memory.

I enjoy using writing prompts. There’s so many potential story fragments – characters, concepts, settings — bouncing around in my head at any given moment that the direction a writing prompt offers can help me think of things in new ways or create unexpected combinations. But this prompt was difficult for me. For some reason, I was hitting a mental block. Why couldn’t I think of a single childhood memory that would be story-worthy?

This story rose out of that lamentation, when I asked the question: what if we had no childhood memories? Or the ones we had, we knew weren’t real? Our memories are such an integral part of us; how would false ones change how we view ourselves and our identity?