Time has run out for the Oversight/Winfinity universe. On the road to insanity, the United States did a surprising thing: it took a sharp turn towards rationality. Or so one can hope. No pun intended.
For those billions who have not followed my writing excessively, the Oversight/Winfinity universe was born in “Winning Mars,” in which a Mars colony is accidentally started by a reality TV show, in the shadow of an oppressive “Oversight” regime in the United States. It was followed by “Saving Mars,” where the US government is overthrown by a corporate coalition looking for control of a newly-developed rejuvenation technique. Yes, I know. Cheery times.
To celebrate the death of this universe, I’ve decided to take the final novel in the Oversight/Winfinity universe and put it up on this blog, serial-style, over the course of 2009. Yeah, I know. Cliffhangers. What a pain in the ass. But hey, Eternal Franchise isn’t all about corporate drones. It has aliens. And robots. And nuclear weapons. And kinda-sorta-working faster-than-light travel.
And yeah, I know, maybe we could still end up with this future. But not on the Oversight/Winfinity timeline. So think of this as alternate history. In the future. (Alternate future?)
Starting today, I’ll be putting up a chapter’s worth of Eternal Franchise every week for your enjoyment. Or whatever. Along with other articles, news, and opinions, of course.
I’m so thrilled with this one that I’m breaking my “no color in the posts” rule to show you just how cool the Interzone 220 cover is.
And no, I cannot claim that “Monetized” inspired the cover, but I have to give kudos to the designer and to Interzone for pushing things well beyond what you’d expect to see on a newsstand. One of the strengths of print is in freeform layouts; it’s great to see someone not locked into the horizontal grid format.
But I am thrilled about the story, too. “Monetized” is my best bet at what the world will really look like, in, say, about a decade and a half. It takes a number of trends, mashes them together, and puts an overarching de facto propagation economy on top of them.
And, before people jump on me about being one of the first stories set in a future US that is post-economic downturn, let me say this: “Monetized” was written well in advance of even the earliest outliers of the global economic crisis.
(Though I doubt if what we’re in now is the “Big Dump” I mention in “Monetized,” it does bear some striking similarities. Maybe I’m more prescient than I think. Or just lucky.)
In any case, I hope you enjoy the story. You can pick up an electronic copy of Interzone here and subscribe electronically here or in print here.
. . . that the old way of doing this is the right way or even the cheapest way.
I’ve had this drilled into my head by several real-life examples over the last few months. Things are changing so fast that you really owe it to yourself to do a couple of quick Google searches before you go romping off with assumptions that are a decade (or even half a decade) old.
Fair warning: the following post contains a couple of engineering-ish examples. If you’re allergic to technical stuff, it’s probably best to skip this one.
Case 1: Pen and napkin versus Google Earth/Redfin/Second Life. You may have seen the Sylmar fires on the news a couple of months ago. A friend of mine lost his house in the fire. It was insured, so it’ll get rebuilt.
But, while it’s in the process of getting rebuilt, he figured: “Hey, this is my chance to throw in some money and fix some of the problems with the house. Change the floorplan. Make it a bit bigger. Hell, maybe move the foundation back for a better view.”
And so, a few nights after the fire, he was sketching his ideas in the most classic of forms: pen and napkin. I glanced at it and thought, “Wow, he’s drawing the house as if his lot is 200 feet wide.” Which I knew it wasn’t.
To make a long story shorter, I helped him find his lot lines on Redfin and match them up to a dimensioned Google Earth map, which showed a lot size of just about 60′ wide. Knowing that Google Earth isn’t exactly an architect’s tool, though, we also measured the lot the next time we were at the house. It turned out to be 59.5 feet wide. Good enough.
From there, we did a 0.1″ = 1′ overlay in Adobe Illustrator and let him sketch something like what he wanted, with believably-sized rooms, that fit on his lot.
And then, just for the hell of it, we imported the sketch into Second Life, threw up a few walls, and created a walk-throughable house in about an hour. When my friend doubted the dimensions of his garage, I simply pulled a car out of inventory and put it in the garage, cloned it, and showed him how there’d be plenty of space for washer, dryer, and tools.
Bottom line: no, it’s not architect-ready, but the architect he’s working with now has a much better idea of what he wants–and we can tweak the plans in real time if we want to do what-ifs. Not bad for a total of about 2 hours invested . . . which you could easily burn making non-workable sketches on napkins.
Case 2: iPhone versus a whole lotta engineering. My wife is a TAPS member. Yes, that’s right. She chases ghosts. That’s a whole different story in itself. But one of the things they do in TAPS is look for EVPs (electronic voice phenomena), which tend to appear most on noisy equipment.
(Now, I’m not going to get into arguments about whether or not ghosts exist, or, if they do, are they influencing the equipment through the EM spectrum or through quantum effects like shot or thermal noise. That’s her bag.)
But, I figured, “Why not make her a piece of equipment that is inherently noisy? I could use a noise diode, amplify it to 1/3 the sample step size, and use a really bad A/D converter, like, maybe, 8 bits, or even 6. All I’d need would be a noise diode, a microprocessor, an A/D, a power supply, a microphone and some associated electronics, and an output to a recorder, or maybe I could add in some memory so it could record internally, but then I’d need a USB interface, and I’d need to write the code for the PIC micro, and I should put it on a PC board, and in a case so they could carry it around–”
And then I looked at the iPhone in my hand.
Which had a microphone, an (extremely powerful) microprocessor, A/D and D/A converters, power supply, case, associated electronics, computer interface, memory, recording capability–
–and had a free software development kit that I could download.
Hundreds of hours of hardware and software work just became learning the capabilities of a platform and doing some coding.
Case 3: Cheap eBay scope versus new scope. For a number of reasons, I’ve decided to get back into the audio engineering game a bit. Yes, I am an idiot. But, to do this, I needed to get some new equipment. My old oscilloscope was finally dead. So I started looking on eBay. A cheap Tektronix 465 would be just fine, I figured. And maybe a Sound Tech for distortion analysis. Or an Audio Precision System One, if I could find a used one.
All very sound, logical reasoning.
But, just for the hell of it, I decided that I’d look at what was available new. And got the shock of my life. Today, inexpensive digital sampling oscilloscopes also include FFT–which can be used for distortion analysis and used to be only found in expensive, standalone packages.
The bottom line? I could buy a new Tek scope with FFT, the ability to export files for analysis on a computer, and a lifetime warranty for not significantly more than the old, used scope. And the new scope would outperform the $20,000 or so of equipment I used to work with a decade ago.
So what’s the point of all of this, from a science-fictional perspective? Well, actually there are two points:
1. Things are moving so fast, we can’t base our futures on linear extrapolations. It’s no longer about a new, incrementally better model every year. It’s about wholly new capabilities being remixed in wholly new ways.
2. With all these new, wonderful, and free (or inexpensive) capabilities, more people can do more things. And they can come up with new ways to use the tools. Change is going to accelerate even more.
When I first recieved the email from Wyrm, my first reaction was “Cool! I’m in another anthology.” Then it was, “Wait. Printed anthology from online stories? What?” And then, when I sat down and considered it for a bit, I thought, “Hmm, this may be a very good idea. There’s a lot of online fiction out there. Very few people have the time and inclination to winnow through it. And it’s right there, in the same format, in a convenient book (or ebook, one wonders).”
And, for all of us, I’m thrilled to see this level of recognition for online publication. There was a time in the far distant past–say, ten years ago–that online publication was hardly considered worthy of review. Today, there are a lot of fine authors whose work only shows up online.
Thanks again to Futurismic for publishing the story, and thanks again to Rich Horton!
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.
For those billions who have not followed my writing excessively, the Oversight/Winfinity universe was born in “Winning Mars,” in which a Mars colony is accidentally started by a reality TV show, in the shadow of an oppressive “Oversight” regime in the United States. It was followed by “Saving Mars,” where the US government is overthrown by a corporate coalition looking for control of a newly-developed rejuvenation technique. Yes, I know. Cheery times.
