{"id":3297,"date":"2018-07-18T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T12:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/?p=3297"},"modified":"2018-07-16T15:55:34","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T15:55:34","slug":"the-story-behind-the-story-papa-bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/2018\/07\/18\/the-story-behind-the-story-papa-bear\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind the story: Papa Bear"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, Futures<\/a> is delighted to welcome Kurt Pankau with his apocalyptic story Papa Bear<\/em><\/a>. Although he is based in St Louis, Missouri, you can also find him on the web, either at his website<\/a> or by following him on Twitter<\/a>. Here, he reveals what inspired his latest tale \u2014 as ever, it pays to read the story first<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Writing Papa Bear<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There was a story in my family about an aunt with Alzheimer\u2019s. When my mom visited, the aunt would ask after Mom\u2019s parents, who had been dead for years. Upon learning this, she would experience the grief anew and become despondent. But then the memory of the conversation would leave her and, a few minutes minutes later, she\u2019d ask after Mom\u2019s parents again. Mom quickly learnt to answer \u201cThey\u2019re doing just fine.\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Papa Bear<\/i> started as a question: what if the long dead thing in this situation wasn\u2019t a person, but rather was civilization itself? How would that affect someone? How would it affect the people who loved them? How would they even survive? At the time I wrote this, some relatives were having trouble living on their own, and I was struck not just by the changes in them but in the emotional and physical toll it took on the people who were helping them out. So I wanted to focus the drama of the story on that sort of relationship: someone who loved Papa Bear dearly but was completely drained from having to take care of him. Everything else in the narrative flowed from that.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The details of the apocalypse are left intentionally vague. The main drama is the interpersonal relationship; the end of the world is just background noise. I liked the idea of coldness as an ever-present threat because it mirrored the idea of hibernation (the title character’s name is \u2018Bear\u2019 after all). Apocalypse dramas in the past few years have taken a turn towards romanticism, where the survivors live in a broad, open, untamed land. It feels to me like a strange sort of wish-fulfilment fantasy where the villain is the very idea of modernity. I wanted to avoid that, so I opted for a bleaker landscape that would kill you if you stayed outside long enough. The biggest technical challenge for me was finding a way to let snippets of the world-building leak through \u2014 enough for the reader to piece things together \u2014 but not so much as to undermine Papa Bear\u2019s sense of confusion.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Kurt Pankau with his apocalyptic story Papa Bear. Although he is based in St Louis, Missouri, you can also find him on the web, either at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals what inspired his 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-3297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3297","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=3297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/futureconditional\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}