Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: In the spaces of strangers

This week, Futures is exploring the murky world of mind transference courtesy of In the spaces of strangers by L. P. Lee. An English Eurasian writer based in London,  L. P. Lee splits her work between fiction and screenwriting. You can find out more about her work at her website. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to the read the story first.

Writing In the spaces of strangers

The story came about when I started looking into the idea that we’ll one day be able to upload our minds and live outside of the bodies that we were born into. It’s fascinating that there are neuroscientists and start-ups exploring how to turn these ideas into reality.

It makes you wonder how people, with all the baggage that they bring to the table and their varied ways of navigating society, might put this kind of technology to use.

I was curious about how it could play out if people from different backgrounds in British society started transferring across to each other, as opposed to uploading to a computer. It’s a flight of fancy, where brains are bits of machinery that can be emptied and refilled again. In my story, I wanted to explore what could happen in a relationship of power imbalance between two individuals.

Although there’s the potential for mind uploading to move us forward and be the next step in human evolution, possibly it will enable baser, more vampiric instincts too.

Comments

There are currently no comments.