Tomorrow Factory: Collected Fiction

AUTHOR’S NOTES

“All That Robot Shit” started gestating back when I was nine years old and obsessed with LEGO’s Bionicle toys. I loved the idea of advanced robots on a tropical island developing their own culture, religion, and rudimentary technology. When I started writing seriously a decade later, I knew I wanted to take that concept for a spin.

The seed of the story lingered in a notebook for years. In 2011 I had something quite philosophical in mind, shades of C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra and some Lord of the Flies. It ended with the shipwrecked human being eaten by his mechanical companions after they decide that he is not a true person, only an animal.

But when I finally wrote the story in 2016, “All That Robot Shit” became a bittersweet potty-mouthed bromance instead of a depressing philosophical treatise. I can’t say I mind—this work is one of my personal favorites.

I know I was going to school in Edmonton when I wrote “Atrophy,” but I don’t remember much about the process. The eyeball replacement was definitely inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and by “They Trade in Eyes,” a Christopher Ruz short story.

In a way, “Atrophy” is responsible for introducing me to the speculative fiction community at large. I sent it to the Dell Award on a whim, but when it was named a runner-up, I took the opportunity to escape blizzard-struck Edmonton for a weekend. (The Dell Awards are presented at ICFA, a conference that takes place yearly in balmy Orlando.)

It was at ICFA that I met the editor of Asimov’s, Sheila Williams, along with a host of writers and other professionals in the field. Putting faces to names was really cool, and I’ve returned to Orlando for the conference weekend several times since.

This was the first story I ever had published, back in 2011 in a tiny, long-gone webzine whose name is lost to my memory. It later featured in a self-published Kindle collection that was a magnificent flop.

Despite that, I still have warm feelings for “Every So Often.” I wrote it during my one year in Providence, Rhode Island, when I was just starting to be aware of my writing as something people might want to publish—and pay me for. This was also long before anyone told me Hitler time-travel stories had already been done to death.

“Ghost Girl” was inspired by two disparate sources: a news article about the persecution of people with albinism in Sub-Saharan Africa, due to the belief that their severed body parts have magical properties, and the Big Daddy/Little Sister element of the video game BioShock. Those ideas intertwined and produced the story’s central image of a little albino girl, picking through a scrapyard, with a hulking mechanical protector looming behind her.

I did some research for the setting, which is Burundi, but not as much as I might do now. For sensory details, I mostly used my memories of growing up in Niger: the throngs of scrawny goats and mopeds, the mud-brick walls topped with broken glass to deter burglars, the man with no nose, and of course the climactic dust storm.

This flash was inspired by a walk to the gym in early winter, under a sky that was perfectly blank and colorless in all directions.

Pattaya was probably the city I liked least when I was in Thailand during summer 2013, but it also made the most lasting impression. It’s the only place I’ve ever described as lurid. It’s also cyberpunk enough, with its neon hubbub and seedy nightlife, that I didn’t need to dial things up very much while writing “You Make Pattaya.”

This story racked up quite a few rejections before it found a home in Interzone, which makes its subsequent Year’s Best appearances and translation a pleasant surprise. Sometimes people get tired of heart-wrenching or thought-provoking and really just want to read a fun con caper.

I wrote “Extraction Request” while staying at my grandma’s house for Christmas 2015, but I never gave it to her to read—the ending is her least favorite kind. The plot is basically Halo: Combat Evolved, or Aliens or any number of action movies where soldiers are faced with an unexpected and monstrous foe. My original plan was to knock the characters off one at a time, but it was taking too long, so I did them in clusters and then had the last two commit suicide.

More so than plot, the thing that draws me to military science fiction is the cool technology. The hardware in this story is heavily influenced by the 2013 movie Riddick, which I watched while drunk enough to convince myself it was pretty good.

My roommate got me hooked on NBA basketball during my year in Rhode Island. I’ve been a Timberwolves fan ever since, which has proven to be a pretty masochistic pursuit. Until this season. I hope.

Blending sci-fi and basketball didn’t occur to me for quite some time, but when it did, it seemed obvious. Writing “Meshed” was a ton of fun. I got a kick out of referencing then-rookie Giannis Antetokounmpo and then-YouTube sensation Thon Maker.

The climactic one-on-one is obviously inspired by He Got Game, but also by late nights playing on outdoor courts back in high school, and by Bruce Brooks’s The Moves Make the Man, a novel that got inside my head as a kid and never really left. “Meshed” was also the first story I got a film rights inquiry for. It came to nothing, of course, but it was a bit of a rite of passage.

This one is a mishmash of Dead Space, Alien, and that level in Halo 3 with all the sphincters. I managed to indulge both my artsy and my immature sides: there’s a “wayyy up there” Rick and Morty reference not long after an homage to Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

The first draft, written back in 2015, was a total mess. There was a lot of schlucking about through the ship’s innards while the protagonists bickered and offered various theories on what happened to the original crew—not very genre-savvy of them.

I sent my bad draft to the late, great Kit Reed, who rightly suggested major surgery. “Take out a few yards of intestine and work out the psychology” is some of the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten. Two summers later, while staying at my grandma’s, I finally sat down and wrote a new draft. The result is a hell of a lot smoother. Thanks, Kit.

This flash was inspired by an aborted romance.

This story was definitely written in Edmonton, judging by the protagonist’s LRT journey, but it also draws on memories of Grande Prairie—my first job was at Superstore, where I spent quite a bit of time poling cardboard into the dry compactor. I don’t have a clear memory of writing “Dreaming Drones,” so it was a pleasant surprise when I stumbled across it.

I like the slow sleepwalking pace, and the slight twists on the typical story of a robot who wants to be human. These stories aren’t really about robots. I think they’re about the universal human experience of feeling different, feeling not quite accepted or not quite on the same wavelength as everyone else, and how subtly painful that can be.

I banged out “Let’s Take This Viral” over the course of a weekend with a feeling of absolute freedom. Because it’s set on an artificial space station in the far future, I indulged one of my problematic writing habits, which is creating an avalanche of invented vocabulary and throwing the reader right into the thick of it. I love playing with language, and this was a perfect opportunity.

The characters in this story are both very resonant for me: the less-fun, less-adventurous friend seeking stability, and the hedonist driven by a need for salience. “Let’s Take This Viral” is essentially about the possible pitfalls of immortality, about everything becoming so recycled and so stagnant that the only change left is death. I’ve always been scared of dying, but just as scared of an afterlife—heaven or hell—that never ends.

The ending of this story is probably my favorite of any I’ve written thus far.

When I was a little kid I had a VHS called Spider-Man: The Venom Saga that compiled three episodes of the 90s Spider-Man cartoon into a full-length film. I remember watching it obsessively in my grandparents’ trailer until it became a sort of story archetype for me: the mysterious organism that grants power at a price, the initial thrill, the slow realization, the jealousy that turns deadly—it all got very deeply ingrained in my brain.

Years later, The Spectacular Spider-Man reignited my forgotten fascination and I decided to write “Brute.” The name of the titular organism comes from Til We Have Faces, a book by C.S. Lewis that is one of my all-time favorite works. I have a love for this story that others might not share. It’s tailored specifically to my childhood self. It goes into all those old places in my brain and flicks all the dusty switches.

One of the best things about putting together this collection has been the chance to give readers a look at stories of mine that flew under the radar. “Your Own Way Back” was one of my first professional publications, but it’s also one of the most emotional pieces I’ve ever written.

The name of the main character, and his love for swimming, both come from the brilliant book Inventing Elliot by Graham Gardner. The central conceit comes from a dream I had, where a family was waiting with red balloons in a hospital where there was a machine that brought people back from the dead—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

Originally this poem was set on the Moon, but the physics didn’t match up right with the images I wanted so I had to switch over to an unnamed asteroid.

Like most of my stories, “Capricorn” is an amalgamation of works I’ve consumed in the past. In this case, it’s mostly a mash-up of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (futuristic prison, cryostorage, shivs, violence) and Breaking Bad (rogue chemists, mortal illness, drugs, violence).

One of the small thrills of writing is being able to establish an ultimate badass in any given universe. In this one, it’s the eponymous Capricorn, who hardly appears at all. I liked the idea of having a character hang over the whole story and influence its events without ever being physically present.

“Edited” is based off a very vivid dream I had in 2014, which birthed not only this story but also “Spiked” in Abyss & Apex and “Masked” in Asimov’s.

The dream was of three teenagers breaking into a parent’s summer rental, a sort of organic cabin made of coral, in order to party. There was a nervous energy to the proceedings, because one of the teens had changed, or had been changed, in some way, and the other two were unsure how to treat them.

In the dream it was unclear if they were recovering from an accident, if they had been modified by an outside force without their consent, or if they had done something surprising to themselves.

“Edited” shows one possibility.

This is the most recent work in the collection—I wrote it in September 2017. It began gestating much earlier, however, jotted down in my idea repository as sentient trains crisscross a desert long after the collapse of civilization. The inspiration for this image comes, of course, from Mario Kart 64.

I was playing the drinking version of this game at a friend’s house, and the Kalimari Desert level struck me, for the first time, as a post-apocalyptic wasteland where sentient trains and roaming smart mines (those annoying little bombs on wheels) were the only survivors.

I’m hopeful that “Circuits” still has some of the fun factor of its originator, despite the bleak setting. My grandma liked it.

I was mulling over the concepts for quite a while before I wrote it, thinking about the hyper-self-awareness of Instagram and how the logical extreme of a selfie would be observing yourself in third person at all times. I had the chance to talk this concept over with my writer/lawyer friend Sandra while I was visiting her in Porto.

A few months later, I sent her “Razzibot,” which I had decided to set in her hometown. She corrected all the small Portuguese details I’d butchered and told me I was welcome to come back for natas anytime.

“Razzibot” is one of those stories people will ding for not having an essential speculative element, but I’ve never really bought into that. I view science fiction as a collection of aesthetics, and I loved infusing the future aesthetic into one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to.

I wrote this flash before I bothered learning what cloud computing actually entails.

Like “Edited,” this one draws heavily on my high school experience. Everything from the physics class to the basement where our protagonists download Maestro 2.0 to the neighborhood of the house party will seem strangely familiar to any friends of mine from high school. I even forgot to change Dyl’s name, but he won’t mind.

The retroparty itself is based off the most memorable party of grade twelve. Someone stole the host’s Xbox; a girl refused to come out from under a parked car; a guy from Detroit brought a gun; the cops put a hole through the bathroom door trying to extract a couple reluctant to stop partying. I left wearing one of my shoes and one of someone else’s. It was a good night.

The core concept for this one comes from Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon series, while the mastermind-bodyguard duo is inspired by Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books, which I devoured as a kid.

It took a long time for “An Evening with Severyn Grimes” to see daylight, due to the collapse of the ambitious magazine that originally bought the story. I actually wrote it back in 2013, while living in Edmonton and working at a small Liquor Depot. We didn’t do much business on the best days, and Sundays were positively glacial.

I remember I brought this freshly-finished story to work on my laptop and gave it to my co-worker Jordin to read. About thirty seconds in, he looked up at me, raised both eyebrows, and said “whoa.” He didn’t come out of the back office until he finished the whole thing.

Well, this is it. I remember two things about writing “Innumerable Glimmering Lights”: the endless gymnastics I had to do in order to avoid pronouns, and how organically the title drop arrived, as if it had been there all along. Aquatic aliens have always been one of my favorite varieties, and the characters’ overlong names take inspiration from K.A. Applegate’s Remnants series.

I also have one very clear memory linked to this story, and it’s from a conference weekend in Orlando. It was a beautiful warm night, and I was sitting on the edge of the pool with a friend, both of us dangling our legs in the water. The editor of Clockwork Phoenix 5, Mike Allen, showed up, introduced himself and handed me a copy to sign for a special edition. It was the first time I signed something I’d written, and I got this thought, like, yeah, this writer thing is really happening.

I hope it keeps happening for a long, long time.