Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

Another ocean, far deeper and vaster than theirs, but not empty. Not dark. Not at all. Maybe it was a beautiful hallucination, brought about by the creeping failure of sense organs. Maybe it wasn’t.

Four Warm Currents watched the new world with eyes and mouth, secreting final messages down into the water, love for Six Bubbling Thermals, for Three Jagged Reefs, for the children who would sign softly but laugh wildly, and then, as numbing darkness began to seep across blurring eyes, under peeling skin, a sole suggestion for a necessary name.

“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.