{"id":3199,"date":"2018-04-25T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2018-04-25T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/?p=3199"},"modified":"2018-04-23T16:07:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-23T16:07:23","slug":"the-story-behind-the-story-my-favourite-sentience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2018\/04\/25\/the-story-behind-the-story-my-favourite-sentience\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind the story: My favourite sentience"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, Futures<\/a> is heading back to school thanks to My favourite sentience<\/em><\/a>, the latest story by Marissa Lingen. Regular readers will already know Marissa\u2019s work as we have been fortunate enough to publish some of her other stories (a full list can be found at the foot of this post). If you\u2019d like to explore her universe further, you should head to\u00a0her website<\/a>\u00a0or follow her\u00a0on Twitter<\/a>. Here, Marissa\u00a0reveals the inspiration behind\u00a0her latest tale \u2014 as ever, it pays to read the story first<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Writing My favourite sentience<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of my writer friends talk on Twitter about their favourite sentences. I\u2019m not usually that kind of writer. It\u2019s not that I never have satisfying sentences, it\u2019s that I\u2019m always more concerned with what I\u2019m about to do than with what I just did. So when someone asks me for a favourite sentence of mine, I\u2019m a bit lost. However. There was a typo in someone\u2019s tweet, and I was off to the races.<\/p>\n

Kids are often being asked their favourite of this or that. Your favourite animal, for example, or your favourite fruit. As an adult, this seems a bit silly to me: surely a pear that\u2019s perfectly in season is better than raspberries that are out of season, and in a few months it will be reversed. And yet at the same time, they have to practise writing paragraphs on something<\/em>, and the things in their immediate surroundings make a lot of sense.<\/p>\n

So for this story, I remembered one well-meaning teacher who asked about our favourite music and exposed fault lines she had no idea were there, all over a classroom of pre-pubescent children. And I started thinking: the immediate surroundings of children of the future would be very very different. And of course there was that typo\u2026<\/p>\n

Other Futures stories by Marissa Lingen<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seven point two<\/a> |\u00a0Planet of the five rings<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Running safety tips for humans<\/a>|\u00a0The most important thing<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0The many media hypothesis<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Boundary waters<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Maxwell\u2019s Demon went down to Georgia<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0The stuff we don\u2019t do<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Unsolved logistical problems in time travel: spring semester<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Entanglement<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Quality control<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Search strings<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Alloy<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, Futures is heading back to school thanks to My favourite sentience, the latest story by Marissa Lingen. Regular readers will already know Marissa\u2019s work as we have been fortunate enough to publish some of her other stories (a full list can be found at the foot of this post). If you\u2019d like to explore her universe further, you should head to\u00a0her website\u00a0or follow her\u00a0on Twitter. Here, Marissa\u00a0reveals the inspiration behind\u00a0her 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-3199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199","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=3199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}