New publication: bio-cyberpunk "Disconnected" at The Future Fire. Story notes included!


My science fiction story, “Disconnected,” is now live at The Future Fire!

It’s a story about protein folding and optogenetics and cognitive augmentations. And it’s also about capitalism, and family, and the enduring need for human connection.

This particular issue of The Future Fire happens to mark the tenth anniversary of the digital publication. That’s quite an achievement, and I am thrilled to be part of it. I haven’t finished reading all the other stories in this issue yet, but so far what I’ve read has been amazing—dark and lovely and sad and moving, original in form and content. I am so honored to be sharing space with this group of authors and artists. Speaking of artists--Miguel Santos’ illustrations for my own piece are wonderful, and showed me something about my story that I didn’t even realize.



STORY NOTES BELOW
  
....................................................................................




The Science


Protein Folding Games

The science in the story is all grounded in real, ongoing research. Online computer games that harness humans’ visual intuition to solve the three-dimensional structures of proteins? Yup, it’s real and the game is called Foldit. Volunteer gamers playing Foldit have helped scientists solve the structure of a viral protein and redesign the structure of an enzyme, leading to publications in the prestigious journals Nature Structural and Molecular Biology and Nature Biotechnology. Some general press coverage of Foldit and the people behind it can be found here and here.

Optogenetics

Optogenetics is hot. It was named "Method of the Year" by Nature in 2010 , and since then it’s just gotten hotter. In brief, optogenetics uses light to control the behavior of cells which have been genetically modified with light-sensitive proteins. This technique is being used to give us unprecedented control of neurons and insight into brain circuits in animal models. An accessible overview is given here, written by one of the pioneers of the field.


Other Science Notes

My description of the electrode arrays at the heart of the “neuromods” in this story owes some inspiration to this article. I also had fun browsing articles at io9 like this. 

The Story


How does a story come together? Some of my stories start out as images; some start out with a character’s voice. This one started off as an idea.

It was more a vague collection of ideas, really. A sense of being fed up with our hyper-driven, hyper-speed, productivity-obsessed modern lifestyle. I think I read one too many of those “10 Things the Most Productive People Do Before Breakfast” click-bait listicles. This sense of frustration combined with some stories I’d been reading in neuroscience. The idea of the sisters was borrowed from a “realist” story that I’d once toyed with and which died in my head before it ever made it to paper. But I still didn’t have an entry point into the story; I didn’t have the voice.

And then I read this lovely story, “98 Ianthe,” by Robert N. Lee.
Plotwise, Lee’s story has nothing at all to do with mine. But Lee’s story uses a second-person narrative voice to devastating effect. And after I read it, I knew that my story, too, needed to be told in the second-person. It needed the sense of immediacy and immersion that is only possible with the second-person voice. And it also needed a kind of distance, an authorial objectivity, that is possible with the second-person voice but not with a first-person narrator. 

Once I knew the voice, I could write the story. It wasn’t quick (I am a slow writer), and there were surprises along the way, but the first draft was fairly clean. And those surprises that popped up during the writing? Such surprises are one of the best things about writing.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On memoir and things I have no experience of—A review of "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life" by William Finnegan

I know nothing about surfing. I've never stood on a board. I've never even seen surfing done in real life (I've spent most of my life in the American Midwest. And even when I lived in Los Angeles for college, I somehow never met any surfers). Yet it came into my head to write a story that involved surfing. So I read a lot. I was interested in big-wave surfing, so I read Susan Casey's book, "The Wave." I read a lot of journalistic accounts. I watched videos online. And eventually, probably inevitably, I stumbled upon a two-part article in The New Yorker. The article is titled " Playing Doc's Games" by William Finnegan, and it was published in 1992. It is famous among surfers. The surf magazine The Inertia called it " possibly the greatest surf story ever" and a writer at The Surfer described it as "the best written piece (all 39,000 words of it) ever penned about surf culture."  I am not a surfer. Yet Wi
Read more

Short fiction recs! Oct-Nov 2023

Some stories that I read and loved, from October through November.    Fantasy “Four Words Written on My Skin” by Jenn Reese in Uncanny Magazine When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back.   A short but achingly sharp and lovely piece about finding what’s been lost. The Fae stole the narrator’s wife, but the narrator has been losing Jess for a long time, before the Fae ever appeared. What follows is a confrontation with the narrator’s own responsibility for that loss, for the distance that’s grown between them. And, at the end, a glimmer of hope—the decision to choose to love. Beautifully told.     “Six Versions of my Brother Found Under the Bridge,” by Eugenia Triantafyllou in Uncanny Magazine Technically it was built on top of a river that had been dredged and filled in some fifty years ago which made the ground under the bridge degraded and pretty dangerous. But rumor had it—and by rumor Olga meant Maria’s oldest cousin who had be
Read more

Short fiction recs! June-July 2024

So many beautiful, strange stories I’ve read this summer so far. Here are only a few. Strange Tales of Beauty and Horror “Markets of the Otherworld” by Rati Mehrotra in Uncanny Magazine In the Market of Illusions, I writhed on the cobblestoned street that wound between the gilded stalls, gasping for air, convinced I was a goldfish. Someone dragged me to a fountain and pushed me in, breaking the spell and—a minor point, except the water was ice cold—drenching me to the skin.   In the Cat Market, I was pursued by a large white Persian and coerced into signing away a month of my life in return for the privilege of petting her. In my dreams, I still run my fingers through her thick, beautiful fur while she leans against me and hums in pleasure. Worth it, I tell myself, even as I wonder which month of life has been taken from me.   An absolutely gorgeous, magical, and at times melancholy tale of a woman traveling through the enchanting markets of other worlds. A story that’s al
Read more