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

Writing Lava cake for the Apocalypse

For the past few years, I’ve been participating in an annual flash-fiction writing contest on Codex Writers Group. Each weekend, we receive various prompts that we’re to use as our inspiration for a new flash piece. This particular week, I was mulling over a couple prompts, but one in particular really got me thinking along these lines: ‘society no longer values something that we have’.

It also just so happened that I was baking that weekend. I was baking cupcakes for a guest blog for Beth Cato’s ‘Bready or Not’ feature in celebration of the publication of my time-travel novella, The Continuum. Up to my elbows in flour and frosting, I started putting the two together and writing a story that’s not just about the value of a good recipe, but also about the value of other things: the knowledge passed down from earlier generations, the farmers and labourers who provide us with the things we eat, the places in the world where these ingredients originate, and Earth itself.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Alvaro Zinos-Amaro with his story A rossum’s best friend. regular readers will remember Alvaro’s previous stories for Futures, which included conversations with a black hole, the darker side of cryogenics, some very unusual shops and a caffeine-fuelled collaboration with Alex Shvartsman. You can keep up to date with Alvaro’s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing A rossum’s best friend

Not too long ago a man walked into a used bookstore, picked out a few items, and asked the clerk for help. 

“I’m looking for more titles in the Foundation series,” he said. “I read them all a long time ago but don’t remember them well and want to re-read them. Any idea what the correct order is?”

I wasn’t that man, but I happened to be in conversation with the aforementioned clerk, who, aware of my knowledge of science fiction, directed the question to me. 

I examined the customer’s selections. One of the books he had picked up was not by Asimov, but by Gregory Benford, who penned the first installment of a Foundation trilogy authorized by the Asimov estate after Asimov’s death. This suggested to me that the man intended to read all novels connected with the Foundation series in one way or another, rather than strictly the Foundation novels per se. I therefore pointed out that to read the Foundation series in its fullest sense would also mean reading the Robot series and the Empire series, since as the years wore on they all became enmeshed. We talked about this for a while, and later that day, back home, I found myself doing further research on the chronological intricacies of Asimov’s vast interlinked universe.

This, in turn, led me to start re-reading the robot short stories, attempting to do so in internal chronological order.

Two of these, in which robots are designed to provide companionship to children, got me thinking about what that might look like in reverse. I’d also recently read Octavia Butler’s stunning story Bloodchild, wherein humans have to integrate within a complex alien biological life-cycle.

After a few days the human-as-robot-companion and human-living-among-aliens themes merged in my mind and produced A rossum’s best friend.

I didn’t hide my literary tracks, by the way. The two Asimov robot stories I alluded to before were Robbie (which you may well have guessed) — and the lesser-known A boy’s best friend. Besides my story’s title, there’s a less evident tribute. Asimov typically derived his robot names from his robot model letters and numbers. Thus, in Runaround, robot SPD-13 becomes Speedy; in Liar! robot RB-34 becomes Herbie; and so on. Likewise, the name of my rossum protagonist contains within it a description of her provenance.

And for the used bookstore fiends among you — if you happen to find yourself fielding questions from inquisitive customers, beware the consequences.

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Eric Lewis with his story Decoy. A tale of intergalactic crime and greed, Decoy offers a cautionary tale for anyone hoping to use technology for nefarious purposes. Here, Eric explains a little more about the inspiration behind his tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Decoy

In this story, a thief ignores the warnings of an underling, and gets his comeuppance through a low-tech trap with a high-tech façade.

Any time a new piece of technology makes its debut, there are two things you can bet on happening very soon afterwards: miniaturization and crime. And be it nuclear power, Bitcoin, or a portable ‘spatial-displacement-field generator’, certain types driven by greed and irrational exuberance often tend to leap before they look to exploit something they don’t really understand. After all, those eggheads who invented it couldn’t possibly know better! Thus there will always be unforeseen consequences, whether it’s the director of your research group keen to market a new piece of tech before studying it fully, or the interstellar thieves in Decoy.

This story is for all the eggheads in the lab who are perfectly happy to let the bosses leap first.

Death is never an easy topic to tackle. What death might mean in the future is even harder — especially if there’s a profit in it. This week’s Futures tackles the issue head on in Ted Hayden’s story These 5 books go 6 feet deep. When not pondering the criminal possibilities of a dead body, Ted writes, and you can read more of his work at his website. Here he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing These 5 books go 6 feet deep

My dad gives tours of Chicago graveyards. Last Halloween, he led a group of high-school students from tombstone to tombstone, explaining who was buried underneath and what they had done with their lives. Unfortunately, the kids didn’t care about history. They wanted ghosts. Where could they see one, now, on this tour, before they went back to their bus and returned to class? My dad explained that the cemetery was full of bodies but thin on hauntings. These dead had no interest in the present. They remained in the past.

Years earlier and thousands of miles south of Chicago, a family put their recently deceased grandmother in the living room, where I was staying at the time. The rubbery, disgustingly sweet smell of her decomposition made it impossible to sleep. The next morning, out for a tired and somewhat dazed walk, I found the grieving son burying wooden crosses in the forest. I asked why and he responded with a word I didn’t recognize. I asked again, he tried to explain, and I still didn’t understand. Eventually, he shrugged, said “Terrorists!” and went back to burying crosses.

I recently asked a friend if he would inherit his family business. He told me, in complete seriousness, that science had made such incredible advances that soon, no one would ever die. His parents would stay perfectly healthy for centuries and, if they managed to avoid the occasional careening bus and falling air-conditioning window unit, possibly forever. He would never own mum and dad’s business, but he would have their love eternally.

The prediction struck me as more hopeful than likely. Personally, I give his parents five to ten years.

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The dead don’t die. They haunt teenagers looking for kicks, demand sons perform cryptic rituals, and look down on their children from heaven.

Or they do die and we, the living, are deranged.

The former proposition strikes me as hopeful, the latter as likely. But I saw a ghost once, so my position is muddled at best.

Death is confusing. As technology evolves, I imagine it will only become more so.

This week Futures finds Marissa Lingen exploring s novel angle on extraterrestrial contact in her story Seven point two. Regular readers will know Marissa’s work (for the uninitiated, a list of her other Futures stories is at the foot of this post). If you’d like to explore her universe further, you should head to her website or follow her on Twitter. Here, Marissa reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Seven point two

What would you tell an alien civilization, if you knew that you were communicating at light speed and wouldn’t have a chance to hear their response?

Hello, we’re here, you’re not alone, we’re intelligent too — at least sort of intelligent. Here’s some stuff we’ve figured out. Here’s who we are.

Well … who exactly is who we are?

Astronomers have been talking about this for generations. We’ve tried various techniques and signals, images, codes, numbers. I know a lot of nerds of various kinds, though, and most of them have a sort of offbeat sense of humour.

So why wouldn’t their alien counterparts?

The fundamental constants of the Universe are pretty serious business, and like everything else that’s pretty serious business, sometimes you have to take them with a little bit of a light touch.

Other Futures stories by Marissa Lingen

Planet of the five rings | Running safety tips for humans| The most important thing | The many media hypothesis | Boundary waters | Maxwell’s Demon went down to Georgia | The stuff we don’t do | Unsolved logistical problems in time travel: spring semester | Entanglement | Quality control | Search strings | Alloy

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome back Preston Grassmann, with his latest story Clocking out. Regular readers will remember Preston’s earlier stories, which have collectively taken us to the Cathedral of time, the vermilion market, Venice, Version 9.0 and shown us broken maps of the sea. By day, Preston is a contributing editor for Locus Magazine, and you can keep up with him by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals the inspiration behind his latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Clocking out

There is a growing number of Futurists, as opposed to Singularitarians (an actual movement defined by its belief in the high probability of super-intelligence and the benefits obtained by it), who believe that extreme mental enhancements will be fraught with social and existential risks.  

Clocking out started with that basic premise in mind and the image of a company town (called fast-towns) divided into eight levels of overclocking. The zones are designed to acclimatize the individual to increasing levels of mental enhancement. Within each fast-town, there are time-zone shifts, where clock-speed moves in relation to mental overclocking (degrees of change) and subjective perception. This is a story about one possible consequence of such a world.  

This week, Futures has been enticed into the world of gastronomy, courtesy of M. J. Pettit’s story Chocolate chicken cheesecake. Now, that may sound like an unusual combination, but there’s s good reason for the recipe. When not dreaming up culinary delights, M. J. is an academic and writer who divides his time between Toronto, Canada, and Manchester, UK. Here, he reveals the origins of his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Chocolate chicken cheesecake

This story began with a dinnertime conversation (of course). A friend mentioned a recent attempt to train a neural network on the recipes found on food blogs and the inedible concoctions it subsequently devised. The plot pretty much came to me whole at that moment as I contemplated the ‘what next’.

In much of my writing, both historical and fictional, I tend towards the absurd, tracing the unanticipated afterlives of science and technology. As I wrote the story, an insight from literary critic Frederic Jameson kept recurring: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”

A number of prominent technologists have revived concerns about the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. These anxieties about automation are hardly new, but in this story, I wanted to read them against a newer set of concerns. I sympathize with social critics who argue that the technologists’ vision of an AI apocalypse is misplaced. The more imminent and invisible danger, according to these critics, is how Silicon Valley transmits many of its shared biases onto our posthuman brethren. We are producing AI that replicates and often enhances our prejudices and inequalities.

That the end of the world comes from the narcissistic tendencies of a reality TV star speaks more to the power of the unconscious over my writerly imagination than to the predictive capacities of the historian.

In this week’s Futures, Anna Zumbro returns to visit A street but half made up. Anna previously introduced us to an unusual cultural experience in The Museum of Nothing. You can find out more about Anna’s work at her website and by following her on Twitter. Here, she reveals what inspired her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing A street but half made up

One of my favourite things to spot in any city is a Little Free Library — typically a small, house-shaped box with a clear front to display the books inside. Anyone can borrow or leave a book and then go on with their day, now brightened by an impromptu library visit.

I like e-books for their convenience, but I feel that there’s something uniquely satisfying about print. Turning pages, moving bookmarks, and reading other people’s margin notes on used copies are all important parts of the reading experience for me. Many readers agree: in both the United States and Great Britain, e-book sales have fallen while print sales have climbed. As a teacher, I’ve heard my tech-savvy students weigh the pros and cons of print and digital text, and have learnt that they too feel that screens are not always superior to paper.

In this story, I wanted to explore a futuristic setting that I’d enjoy visiting, one in which new and old technologies coexist and every day involves travelling through a library.

As we usher in a new year, Futures is pleased to welcome James Anderson with his story, Universal Parking, Inc. James is professor of cognitive science at Brown University.  He read science fiction from an early age and desperately wanted to be the first human to discover a clam shell on Mars.  He has written many scientific papers and several books, most recently After Digital (Oxford, 2017), which discusses brain-like computing and how computer hardware of any kind determines what you can compute with it. Here, he reveals what inspired his tale for Futures — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Universal Parking, Inc.

This short short story is my first attempt at writing science fiction.

I have been reading science fiction in large quantities since I was in elementary school in the 1950s.  At that time, before megablockbuster movies and video games, science fiction was minor genre fiction, widely disparaged, a very guilty pleasure.

However, science fiction determined my career.  Among my favourite science fiction, both then and now, was Asimov’s Foundation series, which I read multiple times.  I wanted to be Hari Seldon, a ‘psychohistorian’ at the centre of the series.  A psychohistorian used tools taken from psychology and mathematics to predict the future course of human history.  Seldon predicted the imminent decline and fall of his contemporary Galactic Empire causing him no end of political problems.  In the books, Seldon’s difficulties were mingled with Asimov’s dazzling scientific extrapolation.

I knew what I wanted to do with my life.  But when it came time to go to college, I looked at many college catalogues and found no majors in psychohistory.  I decided I would have to construct my own programme, combining physics and neuroscience, leading directly to what I have done professionally ever since.

Even though it is short, my Futures story weaves together several strands including a tiny bit of psychohistory.  Parking is indeed an academic problem.  The physics is vaguely plausible.  Easy, rapid shifts between universes are highly unlikely.  More realistic is the ‘history’ thread.  When two societies first make contact, the agents are not necessarily the best of the breed.  Early explorers were often of dubious character, escaping problems at home and looking for a quick buck.  Contacts in North America between Europeans and Native Americans provide many sad examples.  I liked Western movies as well as science fiction when I was young. A major recurrent theme both in movies and historical reality was: “White man speak with forked tongue.”  So do parking scammers.

Every time a new and glamorous technology appears, the fraudsters are near the first wave.  Railroads beget stock-market manipulators.  Expensive miracle drugs beget fake expensive miracle drugs.  Computers beget hackers.

So what would happen when a couple of naive academics meet an interuniversal scammer?  Not much doubt who is going to lose.  Fortunately, though improbably, as in Westerns, a good guy appears at the last minute and saves the protagonists from their folly.  A learning experience, perhaps.

When I wrote this piece, I was in the process of buying a car. I find car names fascinating because they are chosen with great care and sometimes achieve genuine poetry.  Think of the associations of ‘Mustang’ or ‘Firebird Trans Am’.  A different universe would have a different poetry with different referents.

In the final Futures piece for 2017, we are pleased to welcome back Judy Helfrich with her unusual take on first contact in The coupon. Judy has previously toyed with history in Playing for keeps. You can find out more about her work by visiting her website or following her on Twitter. Here she reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing The coupon

I’ve often wondered what the eventual fate of Voyagers’ two golden records might be. What if they really did fall into the hands (or pseudopodia/tentacles/cyborg extensions) of aliens? Would they figure out how to play them? Would they understand Earth’s message? And would they like Chuck Berry?

What if their interpretation of the golden records wasn’t quite what we intended?

The records carry greetings, images and the sounds of Earth — including music — from many cultures. If the aliens’ language was based on pitches and notes instead of pictographs or graphemes, they might think we were communicating through the music. We could be telling them anything, from “we come in peace”, to “prepare for invasion”, to “big sale on kitty litter”. I thought it would make for a fun story if the alien interpretation was something wacky, and The Coupon ensued.

Of course, the Voyager probes might still be hurtling through space, undiscovered, when the Sun expands in a few billion years and encompasses Earth. But that’s okay, too. It’s comforting to know that those time capsules of our civilization will persist after our planet had died. I just hope if aliens do eventually find the golden records, they interpret them correctly. Because any Earth coupons will have long expired.