{"id":1691,"date":"2016-03-02T18:05:20","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T18:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/?p=1691"},"modified":"2016-03-02T09:36:06","modified_gmt":"2016-03-02T09:36:06","slug":"the-story-behind-the-story-ajdenia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2016\/03\/02\/the-story-behind-the-story-ajdenia\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind the story: Ajdenia"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, Futures<\/a> is pleased to welcome\u00a0Natalia Theodoridou to the section, with her story Ajdenia<\/a><\/em>. When not writing speculative fiction, Natalia can be found working on cultural studies. You can keep up to date with her work at her website<\/a> or by following her on Twitter<\/a>. Here, she very kindly takes some time to explain the inspiration behind her latest tale \u2014 as ever, it pays to read the story first<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Writing Ajdenia<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I wrote Ajdenia<\/em> for a flash-fiction contest run once a year by the Codex writers\u2019 forum (thank you for the feedback and motivation, Codexians!). It was a cold, dark January and we hadn’t seen the sun here in Portsmouth for a couple of weeks, so I thought: \u201cI would pay for some sun.\u201d The thought triggered a series of story-rich reversals, which ultimately led to the idea of time-under-the-sun as payment for regulated labour. This is how Ajdenia<\/em>‘s dystopia was born. The name and inspiration for the flower I owe to my writer-friend, Eugenia Triantafyllou (whose surname, by the way, means \u2018of the rose\u2019).<\/p>\n

There is a larger story in the background of Ajdenia<\/em>; it is a story of conspiracy theories and young revolutionaries rising up against a deceitful and autocratic regime, told through the eyes of a marginal bystander who has his own small-time concerns. I wanted Bart to be faced with a hard choice: does he help the hope-filled and hope-peddling stranger, or does he take the certainty of a few more moments of light, knowing the good this will do to someone he cares about? In the end, Bart made the choice many of us make every day. But he was also left with the difficult question\u00a0\u2014\u00a0or at least I hope he was: will five, or six, or even seven minutes under the sun ever be enough?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, Futures is pleased to welcome\u00a0Natalia Theodoridou to the section, with her story Ajdenia. When not writing speculative fiction, Natalia can be found working on cultural studies. You can keep up to date with her work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here, she very kindly takes some time to explain the inspiration behind her latest tale \u2014 as ever, it pays to read the story first.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/281"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}