In this week’s Futures, Robert Dawson returns with a slightly nostalgic feeling in The librarian. Robert has appeared in Futures twice before, once lamenting the rise of Pop-ups and once experiencing Sparrowfall. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The librarian

When I was a student, in those lost days between the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Internet, if you wanted to find me the library was one of the first places to look. Most likely you’d find me in the math and physics stacks, but the whole library was a wonderful playground of the mind. Over the course of a week I’d spend many hours there.

Today, the Internet has vastly increased not only the amount of material available, but the ease of finding it — especially for anybody lucky enough to be searching from a university, or any other site that subscribes to paywalled journals electronically. The time that I would once have spent going between the card catalogue and the stacks, or between the printed Math Reviews and the bound volumes of journals, is now spent at my desk: and the range of journals that I can access from the small teaching-oriented university where I work rivals (it seems to me) what I had access to as a graduate student at Cambridge.

As a result of this, fewer books are being bought. Subscriptions to physical magazines have plummeted (though we still subscribe to Nature) and back issues are often stored off campus, available in a day or so if anybody really needs them. Stack space is slowly being diverted to other purposes.  In many ways, the feel and the smell of books and journals is leaving our lives; this change is likely to continue for some time. Downtown and in the shopping malls, many bookstores have closed.  In homes around the world, the shelves where the family encyclopedia used to stand are empty, the books’ place taken by Google and the Internet. And this makes me sad, though I know that sorrow to be illogical. There are scenarios, I suppose, where a supervirus or EMP weapon could wipe out the Internet and leave us with nothing; but my feelings are based on nostalgia, not (I hope) on any real risk to the enormous virtual library that we all share today.

And yet nostalgia is a real and a powerful emotion. And so I wrote this story of a library closing down; and, in it, I gave a tip of the hat to Ray Bradbury, of all science-fiction writers perhaps the one who evoked nostalgia and simpler days most powerfully.

This week Beth Cato returns to Futures with A picture is worth. Regular readers will know Beth’s work well, as well as writing several Futures stories (details at the foot of this post), she has also written the Clockwork Dagger duology and the Blood of Earth trilogy. You can find out more about her 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 A picture is worth

Like so many science-fiction authors, I enjoy playing with ‘what ifs’ about alien life. In this story, I wanted to take on an alien point-of-view, with humans as the accidental aggressor.

To me, that feels more plausible than a flying saucer landing somewhere and requesting, “Take me to your leader.” Because let’s be honest: here on Earth, we don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to meeting other cultures of our own kind for the first time (or the thousandth-plus time). We make assumptions. We judge. We dismiss. We obliterate — both on purpose and by accident.

I can very well see the same thing occurring when we meet extraterrestrial for the first time … and we might not even be aware of the catastrophe we’ve caused until it’s too late. And, as Klatok’s viewpoint demonstrates, we may very well deserve what’s coming.

Read more Futures stories by Beth:

The 133rd Live Podcast of the Gourmando Resistance | 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 welcomes back Kurt Pankau with his latest story Please [redacted] my last e-mail. Kurt first appeared in Futures last year with dose of disorientation in the intriguing Papa Bear. This time, he’s suffering from a mild case of censorship… Here, he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Please [redacted] my last e-mail

This week, Futures tackles the difficult issues of ageing, care and robots courtesy of L. R. Conti’s story The last child. When not writing science fiction, L. R. Conti writes science fact and has had articles published in multiple publications, including Pacific Standard, The Santa Barbara Independent and Scientific American Mind. In this blog post, we discover what inspired The last child — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The last child

I wrote The last child directly under the influence of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451. Those mechanical dogs and Guy Montag’s need to escape helped me create a world with robot companions and a certain societal repression. Although, in hindsight, it was also born in the context of Atul Gawande’s nonfiction Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. I found the question: how will we care for our growing and ageing population when our society puts top priority on personal independence, jarring. I’m worried about our Boomers — and the rest of us.

Robotics isn’t a field that I generally follow, but I know that automated machines are emerging daily. And that recently scientists engineered a small, soft-robot propelled by heart cells¹. The first time I saw cardiac cells beating on a Petri dish, my own heart skipped a beat. And now, strategies to 3D-print biomaterials, such as bones², as well as methods to grow cells in 4D systems³ (think growth in all directions that can change with time), is setting the stage for larger, cell-based structures. With the additional possibilities of using donor tissue to establish stem-cell lines that can differentiate into any cell type⁴, ‘cellular robots’ emerged as a concept in The last child.

Although the query ‘cellular robot’ on Google shopping doesn’t conjure images of android-caregivers, I find the current availability of technological-social products intriguing. AI text-based chatbots, such as Replika, Wysa and Woebot, are marketed to provide mental well-being or even therapy. A while back, I downloaded Wysa as an app to my phone. A blue penguin told me that my secrets were safe and asked me what I was grateful for. Then it told me a knock knock joke, prompting me to interact. “Who’s there?” it suggested. It wasn’t Phillip or Anette, but maybe with some time, I’ll grow to love that little penguin.

A few years ago, I saw a YouTube video about PARO, a robot-companion in the form of a cuddly big-eyed seal. Patients in a dementia facility smiled and petted the fluffy animal. Although the research shows that PARO is good for the elderly as well as their caregivers⁵, I had a heartsick reaction to the story; a feeling that still lingers.

Of course, my own caregiving experiences contribute to the heart of The last child. The intimacy and burden of caring for ailing parents is rich terrain, woven with logistically and emotionally shrouded trails. Now, as a parent of adolescents, I’m observing my own children explore their boundaries. I know their newfound eagerness to break away is a genetic story that plays out generation after generation; a story, I imagined we might impose onto our robot caregivers of the future.

1. Park, S. J. et al. Science 353, 158–162 (2016). Article

2. Ashammakhi, N. et al. Adv. Healthc. Mater. https://doi.org/10.1002/adhm.201801048 (2019). Article

3. Schöneberg, J. et al. Mol. Biol. Cell 29, 2959–2968 (2018). Article

4. Hilderbrand, A. M. et al. Curr. Opin. Solid State Mater. Sci. 20, 212–224 (2016). Article

5. Lane, G. W. et al. Psychol. Serv. 13, 292–299 (2016). Article