Unlikely Story

Recent Reviews

Unlikely Story #11: The Journal of Unlikely Cryptography has been getting some nice buzz lately. For your convenience, we’ve gathered up some recent reviews. Congratulations to all our authors!

SFRevu and Quick Sip Reviews both cover the entire issue of Unlikely Story #11.

In her latest Clavis Aurea column at Apex, Charlotte Ashley gives an in-depth review of Curtis C. Chen’s It’s Machine Code.

Over at Skiffy and Fanty, Cecily Kane includes The Confession of Whistling Dixie in her Short and Sublime: February 2015 Round-Up.

An Unlikely Interview with Curtis C. Chen

The character of Margaret Fisher in It’s Machine Code is slightly reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple (except on the other side of the law), the sweet, little old lady no one suspects, and thus everyone overlooks. Could you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind the character, and the story in general?

I watched a lot of “Murder, She Wrote” as a child for some reason. And I’ve always been a fan of elderly characters who have a lot of accumulated life experience and suddenly encounter a new situation to which they can apply their expertise.

This story started as a terrible pun: “CSI: Computer Science Investigation.” I wrote a flash piece with that title, then realized it had to be the start of a larger story. Plot-wise, I struggled for a
bit with the “movie hacking” problem--typing at a keyboard is hardly exciting on screen, and on paper there’s also the risk of falling into an infodump spiral. So I decided to make the central crime something more tangible and hardware-related, instead of purely a software issue.

3-D printing is a relatively new technology, still in its infancy, but the printable handgun is already creating controversy. The benefits ultimately appear extraordinary, but at the same time it creates significant complexity in many realms from manufacturing to product control to the very concept of the original. How do you see this playing out in the future?

Well, my hope is that we’ll eventually all have Star Trek replicators and live in a post-scarcity economy. But that probably won’t happen for a few more years.

I’m hesitant to make specific predictions, because things rarely go the way we expect them to, but I definitely expect more growing pains of the type you’ve described. When physical objects are as easy to
copy as a computer file, what rights does the original creator retain, and should we attempt to impose non-native restrictions on that technology? This is what’s happening with digital media and
anti-piracy laws right now, and I have no idea how that’s going to shake out. In the long term, I’m hoping that people will end up placing more value on experiences rather than things, which makes copy protection less of an issue for everyone.

In addition to your writing, you’re part of the podcasting team for SnoutCast, which focuses on puzzles, gaming, and interactive room escape and puzzle hunt games. For those who aren’t familiar with these type of games,could you talk a bit about puzzle hunts, and similar large-scale interactive games? Have you ever run/designed a puzzle hunt, or do you tend to stick to the player side of things?

There are lots of different flavors of puzzle hunts, and I encourage everyone to try them! My particular community creates original brain-teasers which “solve” to reveal hidden messages, usually linked to a central theme or overarching story for the event.

I’ve run dozens of puzzle events with my wife and different teams of friends, starting in 2001 with our version of “The Game,” a weekend-long driving hunt in the San Francisco bay area. Our biggest event was a Harry Potter-themed Game which included a train ride to get to “Hogwarts” (downtown Sacramento) and a custom-built “magic wand” (electronic device with motion sensing) for each team. Since July of 2010, we’ve helped organize Puzzled Pint events on the second Tuesday of every month — we started in Portland, Oregon, but have now expanded to twelve cities, including London and Montreal. You can find
out more about that at http://puzzledpint.com.

There’s a lot of cool stuff happening with puzzle games these days. We just concluded SnoutCast after five years and 213 episodes, and our archives include interviews with many other creators. You can also
visit friends-of-the-show http://puzzlepile.com and http://puzzlehuntcalendar.com for current puzzling news and event listings, respectively.

Authors are notorious for working strange jobs. Stephen King was a janitor and J.D. Salinger worked as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the weirdest job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?

Well, I used to be a software engineer, and I wrote this story called “It’s Machine Code”…

Seriously, though, I haven’t had too many strange jobs. The most unusual one, I suppose, was when a former tech industry co-worker hired me to write some articles for the Wired How-To Wiki as part of a
project sponsored by Intel. I got paid more per word on that gig than any other writing I’ve done before or since. I also did freelance tech blogging for a couple of years. That type of content production is very different from fiction writing; it was interesting and educational, but also split my focus too much, so I decided to stop. I have nothing but respect for my freelancer friends who can juggle a ton of different writing projects with different requirements all the time.

Some authors require complete silence when they write, others need their desk arranged a certain way, or their favorite tea mug at hand. What does your ideal writing space look like — either the place where you actually write, or the imaginary place where you wish you could write?

I personally don’t believe in writing rituals. For me, the greatest inspiration is a hard deadline and another person waiting for me to deliver. When I know someone is expecting a thing, I’ll finish it no
matter what; when my team has announced a date for a puzzle event, we’ll run that event, come hell or high water. I suppose my wish would be not for a specific writing space, but rather the ability to work in any environment regardless of the distractions which might be present!

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

I have terribly mainstream tastes, so I’m afraid I don’t know a lot of very obscure authors. But here are three books I didn’t expect to love as much as I did, in no particular order:

-- THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS by N.K. Jemisin, which does everything right and then some. I don’t read a lot of fantasy, but this hooked me from page one and didn’t let go until the very end.

-- THE SUMMER PRINCE by Alaya Dawn Johnson, which plays on the surface like a YA novel but has the dark, resonant undertones of the best future dystopias.

-- A ROGUE BY ANY OTHER NAME by Sarah MacLean. I’m reading category romance as part of my continuing education in writing compelling
characters and relationships, and there’s plenty of both in here. Don’t judge.

What else are you working on have coming up you want people to know about?

I have a short story, “Ten Days Up,” in the Baen anthology MISSION: TOMORROW, which will be published in the fall of 2015. Follow me on Twitter (@curtiscchen) or bookmark my bibliography web page for further announcements!

An Unlikely Interview with Levi Sable

The idea of knitting code, which is central to Dropped Stitches, is a fascinating one. Are you a knitter? Could you tell us a bit about where the inspiration for the story came from, and how it developed?

I am a devoted ex-knitter. My aunt taught me when I was about twelve—I spent a lot of time in high school knitting in class. I liked starting projects but never finishing them; I bought fancy wool and bamboo needles and they just grew sadder and dustier and a few years ago I sold them all on craigslist for $20 or so. As far as Dropped Stitches, I think the original idea came from a conversation my partner and I had a long time ago. We were looking at knitting patterns and discussing how interesting and complicated they were. Traditionally feminine things like knitting can be so technically complicated, and often garner so little respect. It’s frustrating and intriguing. I wanted to explore a society where something traditionally “unimportant” like knitting is very important — and also to keep it within the feminine sphere.

In addition to your fiction, you also blog regularly for VillageQ and QueerDadsBlog. Does your non-fiction writing inform your fiction, or is it a way to engage a totally different part of your brain when you’re stuck on a scene or a plot point?

I think non-fiction is a great way to approach writing from a different angle. It helps me clarify what I want to say and what I mean to say in both non-fiction and fiction. At least, I hope it does! Non-fiction also makes me appreciate how easy and smooth fiction writing is. Fiction is like walking, and non-fiction is like learning to dance. They both use my feet but only one of them is for everyday use.

On a related note, you wrote about fostering raccoons for VillageQ. Color us intrigued. Is this an ongoing thing? Could you tell us more about the raccoon fostering experience?

I won’t be doing it this season because I have a lot of other things going on, so whether it’s ongoing is up in the air. Raccoon fostering was exhausting and difficult and gave me a lot of respect for folks who save wild animals. It was a lot of bottle feeding and snuggling cute and cuddly babies, until they weren’t bottle feeding all of a sudden, and then they weren’t generally snuggly, either. It was an excellent proof of nature/nurture, and the way that even sweet, well-treated wild animals are still, genetically, wild animals. Also, baby raccoons chirp and purr and kneed like kittens. Just about the cutest thing you can imagine. (You can see some adorable pictures on VillageQ at http://www.villageq.com/raccoon-summer/)

Some authors require complete silence when they write, others need their desk arranged a certain way, or their favorite tea mug at hand. What does your ideal writing space look like — either the place where you actually write, or the imaginary place where you wish you could write?

My ideal writing place is a room full of lazy dogs and a vat full of always-fresh coffee. Lately, I’ve been writing at the dining table, watching the birds on my bird feeders and the squirrels in my backyard. It’s pretty ideal. There’s only one lazy dog, but I’m working on my partner on that one.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

Technically? I won first place in my grade level (fourth?) for an MLK-day essay. I’m pretty sure it was two paragraphs long. It’s been lost to history and I couldn’t be happier.

Aside from that, my first adult work was a short story in Spellbound. Looking back on it, I’m pretty happy, both in that it’s not terrible, and also in that I’ve improved quite a bit since then. It was a fun kids story and I’m so glad they took it!

When your creative brain needs recharging are there any particular hobbies you turn to, people you talk to, or places you go to refresh yourself?

Plants. I have a lot of houseplants and several outdoor gardens. Gardening is a very calming activity for me — it can be low-impact exercise and also lets my brain wander just enough to get reset and happy.

Twenty years is a geological microsecond, but is a vast stretch for a person, no matter how quickly it seems to slip away, and it can be interesting to think about what one’s characters might be doing twenty years in their futures. Do you see anything interesting in any of your character’s futures that you’d be willing to share with us?

Twenty years…Claudia and Jennifer are probably getting old. I feel like, no matter what happens with her expected baby, Jennifer’s not going to have changed much. She might be full of regrets but I don’t think she’s the type to learn from her mistakes. I think Claudia will have gotten more honestly bitter, in a way that’s really good for her. I think she’ll be all out of caring for what people think, and she’ll be happier for it.

We all have our favorite authors, some of whom everyone has heard of, and some of whom are relatively obscure. Who is one of the more obscure writers you love? What do you love about their work? Tell us which story or novel of theirs we should drop everything to read right now.

Aside from everyone who was published in the Long Hidden anthology? Everyone should read Better Girls from Broken Parts by Nino Cipri, and also keep an eye out for their story Shape of My Name coming on Tor.com next month. Nino is a SUPER talented writer and I’m excited to see what they do next.

It’s Not Just Entertainment

There are a lot of reasons why we started Unlikely Story. Many of them were self-oriented (“This will be fun!”; “This will improve my writing!”; “This will help me understand the Other Side! (i.e. why editors and publishers make incomprehensible decisions like rejecting my unrevised manuscripts)”; “This will rid me of all that pesky excess cash that’s been lying around the house!”).

All good reasons.

But the real reason is this: It’s not just entertainment. Good fiction isn’t just a good tale, told well. It’s a sharing of ideas, and a sharing of worlds. A sharing of little bits of oneself out into the world. A sharing of ways of seeing, and of ways of being. Good fiction grows the world.

Merc Rustad’s essay this week shows just how important, how necessary, and how life-changing this can be.

http://www.jimchines.com/2015/02/exponentially-hoping-rustad/

The fact that we can contribute to this, even just a little bit? That’s why we’re doing this.

An Unlikely Interview with Lauren C. Teffeau

There’s a very visual, cinematic quality to Jump Cut, which is appropriate for a story about using film sequences as a drug, and you shared a Pinterest board on Twitter of images you drew on in writing the story. Do you gather pictures as inspiration for all your writing projects? What generally comes first, the images, or the story?

When researching my stories, I try to keep track of my sources, and Pinterest is a great tool for collecting visual inspiration. I maintain a board for each of my projects but they don’t go live until the project is sold/published — so needless to say I have a lot of “secret” boards as a result. As to which comes first, images or story, it depends. Sometimes I tell myself I’m going to write a story about x, and do so. Other times, I’ll envision some sort of scene or situation and have to determine what came before and after that moment to uncover the bigger story. Both methods have their pros and cons, but usually the Pinterest board comes in after I have a solid handle on the story. As a result, I’m usually chasing down pins that match the images in my head, not the other way around.

In this story, you invoke Paul Virilio, as well as innovators of cinematic montage, and draw strongly on many of the themes Virilio writes of. Additionally, Marek’s usage of the technologies of speed stand in stark contrast with Deseronto’s — speed as a means of violence and control as opposed to accident, anarchy and freedom -- essentially the contrast between Virilio and Filippo Marinetti’s Futurists. Can you tell us a little bit about the theories you drew on, especially those of speed and the accident, and how they informed the narrative?

Yikes. There’s a lot to unpack here so please bear with me. This story emerged out of a desire to leverage my master’s degree in mass communication where I studied film theory and cultural studies. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to incorporate some of those concepts into a speculative fiction milieu.

In a critical theory course, I was exposed to Virilio and his ideas on how the mind both perceives and is affected by the speed of modern life, as exemplified by cinema. Moving pictures are comprised of individual stills linked together, and our brains have to resolve the differences between frames when shown in succession to understand the visual information as motion. Virilio posits that people do this in their waking life as well, making sense of gaps in awareness and the passage of time, so it is perceived as a continuous whole. His insights continue to have a lot of relevance in our increasingly desynchronized, decoupled, modern world, for example: “[T]he more information flashes by the more aware we are of its incomplete fragmentary nature,” (The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), 2009, p.55).

In developing my concept of vid-boosting for “Jump Cut,” I wanted expand on Virilio’s idea of cinema as speed by focusing on those gaps in awareness and between frames, which led me to film editing techniques.

Montage, generally speaking, is a way to manipulate space, visual information, and the passage of time in a film. In a training montage, for example, the viewer is expected to understand that the cross-cutting between different activities implies a longer sequence of training (and, by extension, time) that is skipped over. Hence, the viewer’s perception of time can be speeded up or slowed down as a result. Montage can also be employed by cutting to other images, sometimes only tangentially related to the primary story. In these cases, the linking of the two different images forces the viewer’s brain to resolve the competing information to make sense of the association, leading to Eisenstein’s assertion that the collision of two images creates a psychological effect (his 1942 The Film Sense is a seminal text on montage).

Back to Virilio. He extends his theory of speed to that of war, where the trajectory of modern warfare is determined by the speed of its technological developments (see his Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology). In that sense, Marek, who seeks control of the hover cross gambling circuit, is dependent on the speed by which he adopts new technologies like vid-boosting to help him and his players stay on top.

Marinetti’s Futurists saw speed as something to exult in and celebrate. This was part of a larger cultural movement that viewed the speed that came from advances in machinery, automotive technology, and other industrial achievements, as the embodiment of true freedom. This whole-hearted embrace of speed in all its permutations in both art and politics was combined with a rejection of the past in exchange for the future. The Futurists also saw war as the ultimate way to purge the world of outmoded concepts. (Counter-Currents Publishing’s profile on Filippo Marietti provides an accessible summary of the Futurists’ worldview.)

Ari and Jack, as hover cross athletes, are addicted to speed and revel in it, much like the Futurists did. Ari sees vid-boosting as the future of hover cross racing, rejecting tried-and-true practices in the wake of the new technology. Jack, though, particularly in his funk after his friend’s death, isn’t interested in all that. Instead, he’s more enamored of the freedom that comes from fully giving himself over to speed, and the vid-boosting techniques that amplifies those sensations.

But, of course, no technology is perfect. Virilio also believes that creating new technologies creates the potential for accidents related to those technologies as a matter of course. “Speed is a cause of death for which we’re not only responsible but of which we are also the creators and inventors,” (Aesthetics, p. 112). In the case of moving images, it comes back to those gaps between visual information that the brain has to resolve. These disruptions, regardless of how minor, still separate us from reality, and this distancing opens us up to the possibility of misunderstanding the meaning of the images if the brain can’t keep up or make sense of a transition. Similarly, the development of hover cross would by necessity include the possibility of hover cross accidents. I wanted both types of these “accidents” to feature in the story. The first, accidents in perception that the willful misuse of visual stimuli employs to create the boost. And second, the more straightforward hover cross crash, an accident that wouldn’t be possible without the existence of hover cross in the first place.

You’ve lived in a lot of different places across the United States. Has all the moving you’ve done informed your writing at all? Do you find different moods or tones creeping into your writing based on where you’re living at the time?

Moving to different parts of the country has helped me embrace my identity as a writer, something I’ve struggled with for a long time. The places I’ve lived correlate to different phases of my life: childhood, college, grad school, work, and now writing. When my husband and I moved to New Mexico, I had the unique opportunity to reinvent myself in a place far away from family, friends, employers, and expectations. No one was there to watch me fail, repeatedly, as I struggled to develop my craft. Now, I have a supportive group of writers in New Mexico and a life devoted to my stories. For me, writing and New Mexico are forever linked.

Some authors require complete silence when they write, others need their desk arranged a certain way, or their favorite tea mug at hand. What does your ideal writing space look like — either the place where you actually write, or the imaginary place where you wish you could write?

We’re in the process of revamping our home office to better accommodate my writing activities. In the meantime, my favorite place to work is a local coffee shop. The brew is average but the ambiance is welcoming to those needing a comfortable workspace with enough white noise to drown out the rest of the world. The caffeine doesn’t hurt either. 😉

When your creative brain needs recharging are there any particular hobbies you turn to, people you talk to, or places you go to refresh yourself?

Exercise helps jumpstart my day. But sometimes I need a little more creative headspace to work through things if I get stuck. Enter video games. I can just turn on my console and let the hindbrain take care of the rest. Action-adventure games are my favorite. First-person shooters can’t be too realistic, otherwise it stops being fun and starts feeling creepy. And I stay away from open-world environments—if I let them suck me in, I’d never write again.

What else are you working on have coming up you want people to know about?

This June, The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth releases from Roc, and I’m honored my story “Against the Wind” will be included in the anthology. Stories are set in S.M. Stirling’s post-apocalyptic Emberverse, where all electronics, explosives, and internal combustion engines mysteriously cease working and humanity must find a way to survive. The anthology — with stories from Stirling, Harry Turtledove, Walter Jon Williams, John Birmingham, John Barnes, Jane Lindskold and others — is a great introduction to Steve’s world or a fun companion to his novels.