The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Rob Francis’s story “Beneath the Sea of Glass” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 13 October 2017. I’ve always loved adventure fantasy since childhood, but as I got older wondered where all those stories about people seeking treasure to improve their lot in life had gone. So I created Leos and Agris to go find some! They always seem to be in debt and never really get any closer to paying the bailiffs, unfortunately, but …
David Hammond’s story “Making the List” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 6 October 2017. This story was inspired by The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert talks about the extinction of the Neanderthals and the idea that Homo sapiens survived by being a bit crazier than previous human species. (I don’t have a copy of the book, so I’m copying these quotes from Goodreads.) “Archaic humans like Homo erectus ‘spread like many other mammals …
Angie Lathrop’s story “Radical Abundance” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 29 September 2017. What if the means for radical abundance—in the world of this story, strong nanotechnology/ Anatomically Precise Manufacturing Machines/molecular assemblers/von Neumann machines (the butterflies)— were put directly into the hands of people who might really need it? How would those people be able to sort out what they needed? Molecular manufacturing technology has the potential to usher in an age of abundance, …
Simon Kewin’s story “What the Darkness Is” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 22 September 2017. “What The Darkness Is” grew out of wanting to write a story in which worlds are nested within other worlds, so that it isn’t clear which is the “real” world and where the lines between them start and end. Books, songs, paintings – all can be portals through to a “next” world. I liked the idea of the slipperiness …
Michael Gardner’s story “Renewal” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 15 September 2017. Before writing “Renewal”, I’d read a short story about an immortal couple who were both hundreds of years old. This got me thinking about common fantasy depictions of immortals – vampires, Highlander – where they don’t age, they live forever, and every once in a while they change their identities so they can continue their lives without raising suspicions. Of all the …
Laura E. Price’s story “The Lost Languages of Exiles” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 8 September 2017. In many ways, “The Lost Languages of Exiles” is a story that you can read to get to know me. I wrote the last scene first, a long time ago, and it lived on my hard drive for a long time after that, because I didn’t think I wrote romances. I liked it quite a lot, though, …
