One of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard is to write about places you are familiar with. By writing of foreign lands that you aren’t building from scratch, you can miss the nuance of these places at best and completely misrepresent them at worst. That is why Sirens is set in Pittsburgh — where I grew up and still live.
The Pittsburgh Placement
To me, Pittsburgh is the yellow Roberto Clemente Bridge, the bustling North Shore with its golden streetlights, and the towering UPMC building that watches over it all. I know this city because I’ve gone to countless concerts at Stage AE and played on the Water Steps as a kid. This is why I chose to set Sirens here. This way, I can describe the view from the characters’ office windows while reflecting on the sense of staying in one place for so long that you wonder if you’ve sunken your claws into it or if it happened the other way around.
So I wrote about what I knew. Though Sirens is not exactly a love letter to Pittsburgh, the city serves as a backdrop for the story because I’m as familiar with it as it is with me.
Fast Forward to 2030
However, the Pittsburgh we find ourselves in throughout Sirens is not 2023 Pittsburgh. I set this story in 2030 for multiple reasons, but I think the primary justification comes down to optimism.
If you read Sirens, you might be inclined to find describing the story as “optimistic” as an interesting choice. However, 2030 Pittsburgh reflects some of the political changes I hope to see in the world. Some of the laws that are outlined in the story reflect a semi-hopeful view of what I wish to see from this city in the future.
However, the main reason for this time skip is because ultimately, Sirens revolves around technology. The story features the use of an advanced video game system that allows players to have their nervous systems completely taken over. To the characters, this provides a heightened gaming experience. They can see, smell, taste, and feel vividly with this gaming system. The Emissux device poses an exciting gaming experience — and a terrible risk.
Of course, this type of system is not on the market and something so sensory likely won’t be sold for years (and if it’s anything like the Emissux, hopefully, it never sees the light of day). The time skip felt necessary to give the technology some breathing room to seem plausible while still maintaining most of the social constructs that we see today and likely won’t grow out of in the next decade.
What I Know and What I Don’t
Sirens takes place in a world that I am familiar with and in a future that I can only guess at. The story is both a cautionary tale and a hopeful musing of what we can grow into and avoid.
Chloe Ruffennach's Stories 