I’m making a slight deviation from the usual monthly written story to bring you a video of me reading Pumped Up Presidents as part of the Virtual Futures Near-Future Fictions Series.
The spark for this tale of future presidents was a piece I saw from Futurism on In-Ear Translators.
Take a look – I hope you enjoy it.
And, don’t forget…
Eating Robots and Other Stories is out on 31 May 2017.
What do you get when you mix science fiction writers, social scientists and roboticists with an inquisitive audience?
A great event!
I really enjoyed being a part of the whole thing from the initial planning with the Human Brain Project through to visiting the scientists at the Bristol Robotics Lab.
Suitably inspired by all the wonderful robot things at the lab, we writers went away to our respective ‘desks’ and wrote a five-minute story each.
Mine was Eating Robots, which is also the title of my forthcoming collection.
Then, as part of the Bristol Lit Fest, SilverWood Books and Sarah LeFanu hosted Science and Science Fiction: Versions of the Future where we, the writers, read our stories, formed a panel with the roboticists and were quizzed by the audience.
If that’s the sort of thing that interests you take a look at this 5 minute trailer or the full video.
Christopher’s neck was bruised where they’d held him down while forcibly removing his arms and legs. He’d fought them hard, but it had been pointless; here he was, dumped by the side of the road in an old damp car seat, helpless and homeless.
Tears were rolling down his face and he could do nothing about them.
How could it have come to this? Less than a year ago he’d taken an affordable loan from a company that owned massive driverless trucks. He’d replaced his arms and legs with prosthetics to become a highly paid and highly sought after new-breed trucker with enough strength to load and unload the huge cargos.
Now look at him. Useless. Slumped on a dirty seat in the gutter with the small begging bowl the bailiffs had graciously left in front of him.
A group of people approached and his hopes rose. As they got close he called out. ‘Please. Help me.’