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I wanted the structure of the story to mimic the time-jumps that Hwang endures over and over again, in order to evoke at least a ghost of that instability, that sense of unease. I also had some ideas that I wasn’t sure how to make use of individually.
In every group of humans in known and recorded history, there have been members who modified their bodies. The reasons behind their choices vary widely, even within a single society.
We’re already seeing the emergence of fringe groups who call themselves Otherkin, or therianthropes, or parahumanists. But, I think the point is, there are humans who do not see themselves as humans.
“Respect” and “dungeonmaster” are two words I never thought I’d see in the same sentence in any publication, so your question has fulfilled one of my lifetime goals. As for respect, you’re usually being reviled by either your players (even as they ask when the next session is going to be, sometimes with veiled threats) or the community at large in high school, college, or in the working world, and your dating pool slowly and surely shrinks to the radius of a Lilliputian dime.
By placing the story in India, I was hoping to do two things. First, I wanted to evoke a near-future, fairly plausible world, which I hoped would heighten the emotional realism of what is, admittedly, a not-very-plausible premise. The other idea I had was that by setting it in India, which is, of course, a major outsourcing center in our real world, the story might be able to explore some of the socio-economic and psychological consequences of exporting our crappiest jobs to people on the other side of the world, to wonder a little bit about the limits of outsourcing.
Basically, the image revolves around the theme of “cavemen in space.” It was a concept I was toying with for some time. The idea behind it is that in the future, our civilization is growing rapidly, and expeditionary forces or “harvest fleets” are sent out to claim entire worlds, hunting and harvesting alien species for resources and food in order to fuel our expanding race. The twist is that for such an advanced race, our culture and methods are ironically primitive—where cavemen used to hunt wooly mammoths with spears, futuristic hunters now hunt twenty-foot tall aliens with powered-armor and spearguns instead.
Fiction: “Standard Loneliness Package” by Charles Yu, “Faces in Revolving Souls” by Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim, “Ej-Es” by Nancy Kress. Nonfiction: “Feature Interview: Chris Avellone” by Matt London, “The Art and History of Body Modification” by Lori St. Leone, “Five Freaky Futures Your Kids Might Face” by Genevieve Valentine, “God Spots” by The Evil Monkey. Cover: Kai Lim
Aside from the many Class-Ms on which Captain Kirk had disastrous dates, let’s face it: there really is no good planet on which to crash. And if things have already gone so badly that your brave, space-faring expedition has to make an emergency landing on some mapped-but-untested interstellar hinterland, you’re already pretty much up a creek. However, since Murphy’s Law is the overriding constant of the universe, things can always be worse. And with these five planets (some of the galaxy’s wildest), we’ll show you just how bad a planetary crash-landing can get.
From submarines to robots, much of the technology we take for granted today was originally conceived, not by scientists or inventors, but by that biggest of dreamers: the science fiction writer. Once thought wildly impossible, cryonics—the freezing of the recently dead, to be revived and repaired in the future when technology allows—seems to be following that same path.
“Where did it come from? To be honest it was inspired to a large degree by Chuck Palahniuk’s story ‘Guts,’ which is probably the most disturbing and visceral piece of fiction I’ve ever encountered. It literally makes people pass out during public readings. My goal was to achieve that kind of intensity in a science-fiction setting.”
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