Writing the future in uncertain times

In some ways, humans have always lived in perilous times. In the past, life spans were shorter because poor nutrition and disease killed many people well before old age got the chance to. Now, however, science, which enabled more crops, a better understanding of nutrition, and the development of antibiotics and other life-saving drugs, has also created the technology of rapid world-wide travel. The corona virus designated as COVID-19 has spread at an unprecedented speed to create what feels like an overnight global pandemic.

The resulting lock-down of society in an effort to slow the spread of the virus has threatened the world's economy and put countless people out of work. This is scary as hell for a lot of people, and it has highlighted the difference between jobs in the digital world, which can be done anywhere, and jobs in the physical world, which require a person to be present. It also illustrated the length of our supply chain. If people stop going to restaurants, it's not just restaurant owners and cooks and kitchen and wait staff who suffer, it's the suppliers who sell them food, and the truckers who transport it,and the farmers who grow it, and the people who sell the farmers seed and tractors and fertilizer. We are all more economically connected than we ever realized.

If you think about it, though, this kind of epic event also affects people who write stories set in the future. There is no way this pandemic won't have an impact on our history. Once reason I always set my science fiction stories a thousand years into the future (except for Turnabout) is I didn't feel comfortable predicting the shorter term future.

Look at George Orwell's 1984, or Arthur C. Clarke and his series that began with 2001:A Space Odyssey. Orwell only went forward 30-some years. Clarke used about the same time leap (but then the setting jumped forward with the next book, finally ending a thousand years into the future with 3001.). But both books have, of course, been proven wrong. Orwell's story has had an impact on our language and political discourse, but it didn't actually happen (although it is looking more likely every day that Donald Trump is in office). Arthur C. Clarke's story became a visually stunning movie as well as a novel but we went to the moon and did not find any alien artifacts.

In a thousand years there might not even be people anymore. Who knows how many pandemics are going to happen and what their impact will be? I will keep writing, but the future now seems more uncertain than ever.

Technology and the writing process

This post on Tor's website about J.R.R. Tolkien and how he developed Éowyn of Rohan as a character made me think about how technology has changed the process of writing a novel.

For most of the twentieth century, writers wrote in long hand and then paid someone to type the work, or they typed it themselves. The resulting manuscript could only be changed (in any but the tiniest of ways) by rewriting or retyping it. You could mark it up and add notes in the margin, but eventually, if you wanted to make changes, you had to write or type it all out again. If, like Tolkien, you kept every version you typed (or possibly hand wrote), then you, in effect, created a sort of fossil record of how the book evolved.

I really wonder if any writers do that now. With word processing, you can constantly revise the same file over and over. Unless you make a point to copy your files in a different location or to a different name, you won't have the earlier versions. Personally, I only copy a file in that way if I want to revise a story it in a way I'm not sure about.

It used to be that I would have backup copies on floppy disks, but even that has gone the way of the dodo as I now rely on Dropbox for backup. Every now and then I might email a manuscript to someone, which creates a saved version in a sense, but there's no pattern to when I do that.

Actually, when I first started to write, decades ago, I typed a short novel on a typewriter. I think I have the pages somewhere, but I have no idea where they are. Probably just as well.

Besides the biggest impact of technology on writing and writers isn't the loss of a book's fossil record, but rather the sheer number of people who are writing. You no longer need to be so obsessed by the need to get a story down "on paper" that you're willing to churn out reams and reams of typescript pages. All you need is a computer and some spare time. Not a totally insignificant barrier but nowhere near as high as it was in 1973.

So, technology has opened the floodgates. It remains to be seen what the impact of the deluge will be.

Writing technology into stories

As someone who was born smack in the middle of the 20th century, I know first hand that the pace of change has accelerated. When I compare my childhood with my children's I see huge differences:

When I was a kid:

• Only a few moms worked outside the home; not everyone had washing machines and not many had dishwashers.
• Rural areas still had party telephone lines; when the phone rang, they had to listen for the pattern of the rings to see if it was for them or for someone else who shared that line.
• Not everyone owned a television set, and most who did had a black and white set.
• Dogs ran loose, for the most part. If there were leash laws, they didn't apply in suburban residential neighborhoods.
• If you had kids and could afford it, you owned a set of encyclopedias, because that's where you looked things up.

When my kids were small:

• Very few moms were stay-at-home mothers; everyone had washing machines and dishwashers. 
• Everyone had a phone and after about 2000, many had cell phones; my daughter had one at about age 10.. After the Columbine shooting, I wanted to be able to call her any time. 
• People owned multiple TVs, some of them huge, and all of them with color screens.
• Only people with really well trained dogs ever let them run loose. 
• If you could afford it, you had internet access, either dial-up or DSL. Encyclopedia salesman were out of business. 

Actually, my kids are about six years apart in age, and even that made a difference in when technology influenced their lives. My son was a teenager before he got a cell phone. 

Putting the detection in detective fiction

I was thinking about this recently because I read a fair amount of  older novels, very often mystery novels. Publishers (or in some cases authors) are willing to price older titles very reasonably in ebook form, so I often pick them up even if I don't know the author. I can't always tell when the book was published because usually the date shown in the meta data is the date of the ebook only, so I look for clues as to when the story is set. If there are no references to dates or to world events, it can be difficult to tell if a story is set in 1910 or 1930 or even 1940. After WWII, some differences appear-- cars, and telephones become more common. But from about 1970 to 1990, it can be difficult to pin down the time frame. 

The one thing that makes it clear a book is set in the last 20 or so years is the presence of cell phones. in fact, if it's only a cell phone, with a physical keyboard and no web browsing ability, it's usually set in the 1990s.  

Tomorrow's technology today

As someone who writes science fiction, I pay attention to how people use technology.  I can tell you the cell phone has had a huge impact on fiction. Nowadays, if a writer wants to strand a character in the middle of nowhere or lock them in a haunted house or otherwise make them inaccessible, he has to account for the character's cell phone.

And of course, in stories set in the far future, the trick nowadays is to guess how the future will work. Which can be damned hard when it seems like the future is happening every day. When we look at the communicators in StarTrek TOS, we might wonder why Mr Spock needs a communicator and a tri-corder. If our "phones" can do so much, why can't theirs? 

But of course, another factor is, what do people want technology to do? Do they really want a device sitting on the kitchen counter than can hear and possibly see everything that goes on?  Will they trade convenience for privacy? 

I guess the future will tell.

Technology is changing at an incredibly rapid pace!

I was browsing the web the other day, when I saw a set of photos of events in history. Image #17 is of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States.  He helped negotiate the treaty that ended the War of 1812. His father John Adams was the second US president. JQA was nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

I had no idea a photograph of this man existed! It just shows you how new our country is, and also how the pace of change is accelerating. JQA's image was captured in his mid-70's by a technology that didn't exist when he was born, or even when he was president, although daguerreotypes were being made a decade or so after he left office. Photographic technology improved over the decades, but it took a long time until it looked radically different.

On the other hand, look at two famous entertainers, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. In addition to being in many “Road” movies together, they also shared a birthday month and year. They were both born in May of 1903. In December of that year, the Wright brothers made the first manned heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. Both Hope and Crosby were 66 years old when humans first landed on the moon. The jump in technology from the Wright Flyer to Apollo 11 was enormous, and yet it took only 66 years.

Who knows what a baby born in 2016 will see! I'n guessing that when he or she grows up and has a child, they may well come home from the hospital in a self-driving car to a house where all the appliances can be given verbal orders. The really interesting question is what will he or she do for a living when robots cans do so much?

Already in withdrawal

I have been a daily user of Google Reader for the past few years. It's been great! I have a whole list of 20 or so blogs I follow, and I can easily skim over their new posts and read the ones I want to read. But now Google has announced that they will kill Reader on July 1, and I can feel myself shaking with dread.

The general consensus is that Google couldn't find a way to make money from Reader, and so they're killing it to free up those developers to move on to something more profitable (more than zero is not hard to beat).  I'm looking for silver linings, and hoping this will mean opportunity for a smaller company to step up and fill the huge void in so many lives. A friend recommended Feedly, and I have been checking it out, but I'm not sure yet.

Feedly does let you import all our Reader subscriptions, which is nice, and they sent me an email with some useful info on using their product, so I have hopes.

But I'm still a little afraid.

Is the future inventing more than we need or not enough?

I''m trying to decide if this new invention is incredibly clever or incredibly useless. Check out this trashcan that catches your trash. It uses Kinnect, part of the X-Box game system, to recognize that you're throwing something in its direction and then it moves to help you "make a basket" with the trash!

You could make a case for this being a good thing: people will be more likely to throw trash away properly. Or you could see it as a bad thing: people in the modern world already don't get enough exercise and this could make it worse!

I say, if they can invent this, they should just get going on a robot that picks up the trash by itself.

What he said

Well, this is turning into a bad habit! Just like my last post, this post is all about someone else's recent blog post. In this case, it's one by Nathan Bransford, formerly a literary agent, now a children's book author. The post is titled “Will Books Lose Out in a Tablet World?” and the reason I'm posting about it is because it points out succinctly that ebooks are not the enemy of books or publishers. Whether a book is physical or digital, someone has to write it, and lots of people can read it. People who buy and read ebooks are every bit as much readers and book lovers as people who buy and read print books.

But, as Nathan says, people who read on tablets (as opposed to e-ink ereaders like the Kindle, Nook, or Kobo) do have other entertainment options quite literally in their hands. They can browse the web, check email, play games, and watch movies. This multipurpose functionality is the primary reason tablets are growing in popularity.  It remains to be seen whether this danger will in fact hurt books and authors, but it's definitely as issue.

Nathan points a finger at high ebook prices as part of the problem, and I think he's right. Publishers need to look long term and stop worrying about protecting hardcover sales by pricing ebooks so high that no one will buy them; they could win the battle and lose the war, which would be a sad thing for readers.

The future is (more or less) now!

The future has always been now, in the sense that time never stands still. Once someone gets an idea for a better way to do something—and starts to work on it—things starts to change. What's different now is how much the pace of change has accelerated.  When my daughter was much younger, she asked me if I fought with my siblings over what videotapes to rent at the video store (because she and her brother could never agree). I explained that we didn't have videotape or VCRs when I was a kid. Now, of course, it's either DVD's from a vending machine or downloads from Amazon or Netflix. Baring some kind of freaky time reboot, her generation will be the only one to rent videotapes as kids.

There's a science fiction blog called i09 that has a wonderful post about predictions from science fiction that came true in 2012. They're all pretty cool, but the three I found most intriguing were these:

• Dawn of the Cyborgs:  South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius is a double amputee who raced in the Olympics wearing blade-shaped prosthetic legs. His nickname is (naturally) Blade Runner. 
• Flowers for Five Unnamed Rhesus Monkeys: Scientists were able to improve the cognitive ability of monkeys by implanting a chip in their brains. And unlike poor Algernon the mouse, this effect didn't wear off.
• Warp Factor One: NASA has begun working on a design for a faster-than-light drive! It's all very theoretical, but still, it is so cool that NASA is trying to "Make it so!"

This is one reason it's so hard to write science fiction! Reality keeps catching up!

Welcome to the future!

One thing you come to understand over time is, you're basically turning into your parents. I used to get “letters” from my mother that were just envelopes full of newspaper clippings. Whenever she saw a story that she thought someone would be interested in, Mom would clip it from the paper and put it aside. When she had several stories, she would shove them into an envelope, add a stamp and an address, and off it would go to inform its intended audience of whatever my mom thought was so interesting.

I do the same thing, but faster. If I see a blog post or online article I think my husband, kids, or even friends would be interested in, I send an email with just the link and the article title (Shareholic makes it really easy).  Instead of envelopes full of newspaper, they get emails full of links. At least my efforts are tidier.

Disk storage is something else that has changed radically in form and appearance. I remember our first 40 BM hard drive; it weighed as much as a dictionary, and it was about the same size. The other day we upgraded my daughter's phone, and the Verizon guy took the SIM card out of her “old” phone to move it to the new one. I had not seen a SIM card in a while; I recall thinking they were quite small back when I got my first cell phone—maybe half as big as a credit card—but now they are teensy. I swear this thing was the size of a fake fingernail—a pinky finger fake fingernail—only much thinner. One good sneeze and you could lose it forever. And yet the damn thing held dozens and dozens of photos and a few videos, too.

Some science fiction tries to predict the future, but it's difficult to know which direction things will go and how fast. We're not at all likely to have colonies on the moon any time soon, let alone on other planets, but in the developed world, most people carry their own personal communicators that also do countless other things. And while flying cars seem (thankfully) a long ways off, driverless cars are much more imminent.

And of course, there are always ebooks and ereaders. I can't wait for my new Kindle to get here! Rest assured that I'll post a review of it once it does.

Mars or bust!

I find it interesting that this newest Mars rover is getting so much more press than the previous ones did.  I suppose Curiosity is inherently more interesting because it can do more. It's bigger, too, car-sized rather than being compared to a glorified Roomba or an automated lawn mower.

Its also funny that Curiosity has come down in the Gale Crater. I know it was named after an astronomer but when I hear the name Gale, I think Dorothy Gale of Kansas, who had her own kind of curiosity. But whatever the reason, this latest rover has made us all talk about space travel again, and I think that's good!

Maybe NASA should have named it Kirk, because it's going “where no man has gone before. . . ”

Virtual Reality Becomes Reality

A friend posted a link to this Huffington Post article on a Japanese virtual pop star named Hatsune Miku. If you watch the video, you'll see in her “live” concerts she appears three-dimensional. She's also kind of a walking, singing Barbie doll, as far as her appearance—incredibly long legs and a tiny waist. She's not as well endowed as Barbie, because she is, after all, Japanese. Aside from the technology that produces her, the interesting thing is that her songs are, in effect, crowd sourced, written an refined by her fans.

According to her Wikipedia page, she's supposed to be sixteen. She even wears her virtual hair in long pigtails. In a lot of ways, she creeps me out. I write science fiction novels, but I'm queasy at the idea of the image of a teenage girl as a saleable object. It's tad like the camel's nose in Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Girl tent.

But I can see why Crypton Future Media, the company that created her, would see her as a good investment. She'll never get old, never get fat, and never die of a drug overdose. They call her a "vocaloid," and I'm sure they don't pay her overtime.

Here's the video on one of her concerts if you want to watch her.

Going mental in ebooks

I have been struggling with a problem unique to digital publishing. In print publishing, you have more control over the appearance of the page. In ebooks, there is no page, and the same book can appear differently on different ebook platforms. All ereaders let the reader change the text size, and some let him change the font (typeface). On some ereaders, particularly the Kindle, italic and bold text are not as noticeable as they appear in print.

This isn't that much of a problem in the average novel. Italic isn't used that often, and usually it's only one or two words. Bold is rarely used. But in spec fic, you sometimes have situations not found in non-genre fiction. My next novel Tribes, for example, has a plot point that involves technology creating a way to communicate telepathically. This results in “dialog” that's not really dialog. This is text that needs to look different on the screen.

I tried sending draft files to my Kindle with this text in bold and in italic and neither was distinct enough. Eventually, I concluded the only thing to do was to set that text off with a character not usually found in fiction, perhaps [square brackets] or {curly brackets}. I lean toward square brackets because I think the curly brackets look too geeky, but I'm wavering.

Once I decide, I'll be almost ready to send the files off to the conversion house. The cover is taking shape, but I asked for once last tweak, so I'm waiting on that. I'm excited!