The Burden of the Modern Science Fiction Writer

It’s no coincidence that many of the people who wrote science fiction in the “Golden Age” were engineers, technicians, or scientists. Back then, if you knew something about electronics, mechanics, or propulsion, you were fully enabled to imagine the wondrous future that was coming: rockets to take us into space, helicopters to replace cars, household robots to mix your martini.

Yes. Fully enabled. Because the innovations of that era fell solidly, and most visibly, into the electromechanical space. So it was gadgets, gadgets, gadgets (many full of vacuum tubes and spinning open-reel tape, even if the story was set in 2050.)

Today, things are more complicated.

To write fully believable, near future science fiction today, you almost need to be voracious antisocial polymath, deeply conversant in half a dozen technical fields, as well as familiar with ongoing social, economic, and environmental change.

Things are moving a whole lot faster than they were in 1950—and the advances in multiple fields are becoming interlinked. You can’t really understand the advances being made in genetics without understanding the advances in information technology, and you probably won’t have a realistic idea of what all that actually means on a functional level without knowing a bit about how genetically engineered organisms are developed and marketed. You can’t understand the ramifications of information technology unless you’re at the forefront of implementing it, seeing mind-bending demonstrations of ongoing change from the reconstruction of the Sistine Chapel in 3D from publically-submitted Flickr photos, to early brain-machine interfaces, to augmented reality already working on a phone, based on user-generated data, to the myriad of social and business connections happening in social networks. You can’t envision the social changes without understanding how infotech and biotech are changing people, allowing them to communicate as never before. You can’t talk about nanotechnology without understanding a bit about molecular structure, nanotech viewing and manipulation technology, and even some quantum physics. You can’t write about changes in medicine without knowing about genomics, infotech, social tech, algorithmic selection, persistent networks, sensors, and more.

And you cannot pull the curtain back and look beyond linear extrapolation of these trends without some knowledge of what is happening on the fringe. Life extension, full-scale Drexler-level nanotechnology, brain-machine interfaces, neural augmentation and uploading—what will be the surprise that’s the equivalent of the infotech revolution?

Or—let me clarify—you can write about these things without understanding, but probably not in a believable manner.

And that’s the burden of the modern science fiction writer. If you want to write believable near-future fiction, you can’t choose a single point of advancement. You need to have a good understanding of advances in many different fields, and you need to be able to imagine how these can come together, for good or for bad. And to be really believable, you’ll need to know more than you ever wanted to know about how the world works, economically and socially, as well as where the trends are heading.

Otherwise, your fiction will soon read like that Golden Age lit, filled with spaceships manned by human calculators and spinning reels of tape.

December 5th, 2008 / 6 Comments »