I greatly enjoyed reading the comments in the MeFi thread (my personal favourite was this one). Many were very astute, as you’d expect from MeFi, even – or perhaps especially – the critical ones. Potomac Avenue nailed both the inspiration and the intention, while everichon put up a better defence of the story than I’d probably have managed.

So what was I going to  say? Oh yeah, the self-indulgent Author’s Note, for anyone who’s interested. I’d been thinking idly for a while about a story in which several of our science-fictional wishes – teleportation, telepathy, transhumanism – were all granted at once. I wanted to write it in a way that’d capture how radically different the people of that world would be to us, but how could I do that and still make it comprehensible to us meat puppets? I didn’t want to cop-out and tell the story from the perspective of an “unaltered” narrator.

Then I read this essay, which touches on Russell Hoban’s use of language in his superb book Riddley Walker, which is famously written in the opaque broken-English dialect of a tribe scrabbling to survive in post-apocalyptic Kent. David Cowart argues that Hoban isn’t actually trying to create a plausible futuristic language: neo-primitives, thousands of years from now, would surely not think as we do, or speak any language we could understand.

Instead, the text of Riddley Walker deploys vaguely familiar vocabulary so that we can understand the mindset of Riddley Walker – offering us referents we can assimilate, and an implied etymology that allows us to imagine how Hoban’s future world evolved from the one we know. The language isn’t “realistic”, as such: it’s more like reading in translation.

I didn’t think consciously about trying to do something similar, but it’s probably no coincidence that I wrote Overclockblocked during one of my regular Monday night writing sessions a few weeks later. I wanted to keep the plot slight, both because I thought it’d be amusing to dress it up and because I wanted there to be a core that readers could relate to. Ultimately I picked a simple retelling of one of the most familiar of all stories.

(I was briefly tempted to homage Douglas Adams’ version of that trope – “boy-being meets girl-being under a silvery moon which then explodes for no adequately explored reason” – but thought that would be Too Much. The silvery moon made it in, though.)

The story then hung around for a couple of weeks – I wasn’t particularly satisfied with it – before I decided on a whim to post it as an entry to Tate Modern’s TH.2058 competition. And then regretted it, since it didn’t really have much to do with the competition theme – and I couldn’t take it down. So I decided that since it was out in the wild, I might as well post it here. Where I thought little more about it until I noticed a spike in my traffic, coming from MetaFilter. And I think that’s where we came in…