Trick Mirror

LOG · WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT DOES

Trick Mirror is a book of four short stories mixing science fiction and philosophy, written as a creative writing portfolio.

WHY

I took a creative writing class in my senior year of high school, where we were supposed to write 5 pieces, building up to an end-of-year portfolio of about 12 pages in total (four 3-page stories).

WHAT I WORKED ON

I ended up writing 70 pages. The four stories in my portfolio, titled "Trick Mirror", were:

1. Out of sight

   The story of a man whose life is struck with tragedy and hardship, or as I like to call them, character developments (like every other life, but he thought his was harder). He is a flight mission engineer at NASA, and as life gets harder and harder (not just his life, but life on Earth), he signs up for a mission to investigate an object near M45. He is then trapped in a dimensional rift where he sees every decision and every moment of his life, the lives of the people around him, and his life if he hadn't left. The story plays on the idea of perception vs. perspective, inspired by the Charlie Chaplin quote "Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot".

2. Flash Flare

   A fictional thriller about historical experiments on the human brain, from the ancient Chinese dynasties to WW2, that lead to the invention of PETAX chips: a controversial invention that controls certain receivers in the human mind to make people more "evolved". After the great tragedies of 2151, an uprising and the idea of a united humanity, at peace and without violence, push the world toward mass injection of PETAX in all people, to stop anger, violence and "all things bad" in a human. How do you think that turned out? The story is a take on Nietzsche's idea of a world where everything is just fine. Its first draft was titled "Light of the Darkest Picture".

   MORAL JUDGMENTS CAN BE ALTERED BY MAGNETS (MIT NEWS)

3. Future of past

   A greedy corporation tries to fix the world from the mess it caused, and decides to send someone back in time to change things, but he accidentally gets stuck 5 million years ago: no humans, no nothing. Is there a way back, is there a way out, what would you do? I wrote it thinking about what would happen if that were me, a kind of thought experiment on how long I could survive versus live. I also wove Kierkegaard's three spheres of existence into it.

4. Far from a dream

   A romantic story of a young man waking up and realizing his whole life has been a dream, with some characters real and some made by his mind, and his decision between going back to the ignorant bliss of a life he loved, or the painful reality of questioning "real life" in a post-apocalyptic world. I was inspired by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's Rima XI for the romantic side, and by a hard period in my life when I thought everything was a dream and I could wake up at any moment; but the more I thought about it, the less I knew if I wanted to, despite the hardships.

Those are the summaries. If you're curious to read the full stories, reach out to me directly at mojtaba@clyte.tech

WHAT CAME OF IT

My teacher loved it, and the students were in shock. It was printed and shared with the class, but because it was so long, they split the book into two parts for the end-of-year table read. A lot of people read the stories and were thrilled by the complex ideas.