Factoring Progress into our stories.....

[ChloeTzang]

This is someting I'm getting my head around - that science fiction isn't so much science fiction as reality now, and we are living it, and it's something we have to factor in when writing set in the present.

All that William Gibson stuff is fast becoming reality if it isn't already, like cars and cabs.

JUst one example: Tesla just made a car drive itself from the manufacturing line directly to the home of a customer without a human operator. Autonomously. Nobody in the car. It delivered itsel from the production line, off the lot, across miles of public roads, and onto the lot of someone’s home. . Science fiction. But not fiction anymore. Flying cars are starting to go into production. Waymo self-driving taxis. No more talking to the cab driver. Drones and drone warfare / drone assassinations. Robots for everything you can think off - that sci-fi kitchen where you walk in and tell the kitchen what you want for dinner is pretty close.

Another one: Robot grocery stores where you can only shop online and they deliver to your house by courier or by drone....no more grocery shopping. These exist now and more are being built.

What ele is there that we need to start factoring in?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1938816477127418224

 

[Voboy]

My stories will pretty much always take place around 2015 or so, I think. I liked where technology was at that time, and there is still enough stuff I can be vague about even ten years later. It helps that I try to avoid references to things that might date my stories: my characters do not access Facebook at Starbucks on their iPhone, they access Pixboox at Samurai's on their smartphone. I invented things like Pixboox because I wanted a social media thing that could do whatever my plot needed a platform to do, without readers thinking, wait, Insta doesn't do that... and Starbucks went out of business last year... and everyone uses Android now...

More to your point, once Facebook follows Myspace into internet oblivion, my Pixboox will still be going strong.

I'm certainly never having my characters get into a self-driving car, except in an SF piece maybe. I think that'll still be a novelty for quite some time.

 

[THBGato]

I invented things like Pixboox because I wanted a social media thing that could do whatever my plot needed a platform to do, without readers thinking, wait, Insta doesn't do that... and Starbucks went out of business last year... and everyone uses Android now...

My wife did exactly that in her book (which I wish I could brag about on here without outing myself). Seeing a photo on social media is very much the inciting incident of the novel. But given the rate of change in social media (Friendster, anyone?) she very deliberately invented various apps and sites, so that her story wouldn't date too quickly.

For myself, I don't care. I very deliberately put in redundant tech (mini-disc recorders, Myspace) into my story Forty to help locate it in the mid '00s.

Unless you are writing Science Fiction set in the near future, I don't think that this matters.

 

[iwatchus]

Our stories will become period pieces. At least they will if anyone is still reading them decades from now. A lot of what we consider period pieces now were not written as such. Sherlock Holmes comes to mind. It doesn't bother me if I write a story happening in 2025 and some reads it in 2055 and says "That technology is all wrong" I would just be thrilled that someone was still reading it. Of course, I will probably be dead by then.

 

[Writer61]

I am more concerned about using technology before it is available.

My current WIP series is set in the early 90s, and I have to keep reminding myself that mobile phones were not widely available.

 

[Writer61]

Sherlock Holmes comes to mind.

If you like Holmes, I recommend the Sherlock & Co. podcasts, where the stories are set in the present day and delivered by Watson as a true-crime podcaster.

 

[iwatchus]

I am more concerned about using technology before it is available.

My current WIP series is set in the early 90s, and I have to keep reminding myself that mobile phones were not widely available.

I had to keep correcting anachronisms in my Nude Day entry, which mostly takes place in 1983. I ignored the fact that due Day did not actually exist back then.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

The cutest, simplest and most fun robot film I recall is ' *batteries not included. '

 

[TheLobster]

Bear in mind that none of the things you mentioned are particularly new.

The internet is maybe a decade shy from being around for half a century.
Social media? That's quarter century.
Self-driving cars? More than a decade.

Even LLMs and generative models -- which are unique insofar as they are the first of many, many hype cycles in tech that broke into mainstream before fizzling out -- hail from the previous decade.

For some reason it's easy to overestimate the pace of technological progress, but it's actually not that fast at all. I mean, we're ten years after 2015 and I still don't have my hoverboard!

In other words, don't worry about it. Your stories will feel contemporary for longer than you think.

 

[filthytrancendence]

I'm more of a techno-pessimist, personally. Not a luddite. Just that I'd characterize most of what you said as the VC sales pitch and pretty far from the reality of what most people end up having to live with. Progress isn't the only way to look at it.

Forced into gig-economy labor? Wages constantly shrinking? Global fascist resurgence fueled in part by attention-maximizing content algorithms? Political instability, wars that nobody even has the courage to call wars anymore, ubiquitous Orwellian linguistic drift...

Climate change, a second nuclear arms race, the panopticon of both social media and state surveillance, the never-ending snowball of mass incarceration...

Point is, the social and political consequences of 'progress' are far more consequential to most people than the technologies themselves. The historical narrative of progress itself is a relic of mid-century post-war optimism that just felt too good to ever really give up, no matter how clear the destructive potential of its application becomes.

There's a lot that can be done with all of that, and I've tried a few approaches. I get the temptation to pretend like it's permanently the Obama years, though. Seems like somebody pushed on the accelerator in 2015 and either the pedal just broke or the foot locked up...

 

[NotWise]

Most of my stories are set "now," whenever that is. I include technologies that I see and use, but only if they're relevant to the story. That's a limiting standard. Despite changes in technology, most stories are still about how humans relate to each other.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

My current WIP series is set in the early 90s, and I have to keep reminding myself that mobile phones were not widely available.

I never mention dates, decades, eras or most anything that would lead to a conclusion. Sometimes I toss in getting a message on a phone and I have one in the chute that mentions 8' video screens on walls.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

When I had to move a story from 2015 to 2010, making the characters look forward rather than back to the Olympics, I was relieved to realise they could still have smartphones, because they were the sort of tech-loving guys who would have them then.

Some stories set 2000-2005 I gloss over taking photos, because using a digital (or film?) camera rather than a phone isn't relevant, but sometimes the basicness of phones needs to be mentioned, along with lack of mobile phone reception in rural areas (there's still some blackspots).

My characters send texts or emails or 'messages', format unspecified. Some mention emojis or, for the 90s, 'smileys'

Characters drive old bangers or sleek new cars, which saves me having to figure out what model they would actually have.

 

[TiberiusPrime]

Most of my stories are set "now," whenever that is. I include technologies that I see and use, but only if they're relevant to the story. That's a limiting standard. Despite changes in technology, most stories are still about how humans relate to each other.

Same here. I try to keep the date and time period undetermined. The lone exception being a two-parter I did that took place in the early 1900s and then in the 60s. The time periods were important for the story.

 

[MelissaBaby]

When I started my Mary and Alvin series, I intended the narrative to run through the rest of the main character's lives. i gave no thought to the implications of progress or technological change. As the setting is a small town on the coast of Maine, it didn't seem to matter as much as if they lived in a big city.

But decades passed in the narrative. I did make some adjustments on social change. For example, fewer peripheral characters were named Perkins or Moody, and more were Ramirez or Patel.

I asked for advice on the forum, and the consensus was that I ought to invoke the "Mayberry effect," just keep things the same as much as possible, as if the town was outside the real world timeline.

That's what I did. I think that avoiding any significant change is better than getting it wrong. The story begins @2015 with Mary going for a bicycle ride. The epilogue takes place @2075, when she goes for another. This time, her bike is electric.

 

[Writer61]

Most of my stories are set "now," whenever that is. I include technologies that I see and use, but only if they're relevant to the story. That's a limiting standard.

That's the easiest option for standalone stories.

I am working on a set of series in which the MMC will age from 19 to his fifties. That means I have to consider the technology available in the early stages.

 

[ronde]

What we write is limited only by our imaginations because technology is advancing at an exponential rate. Our imaginations are only limited by what we currently "know". My grandfather courted his to-be wife in a horse drawn buggy, and yet he sat in front of his television set and watched a man put his foot on the surface of the moon. If you'd asked him in 1920 if he thought that would ever be possible, he'd have laughed at you. That's because the extent of his knowledge only encompassed things that were currently present in the world. Anything beyond that was just fantasy.

I would venture to say that there is nothing a current author can imagine that won't become reality within the author's lifetime or within the lifetimes of his or her children.

That also means that anything we write will always be relegated to the past whether you state dates or not. The context of the story will almost always "date" the story whether you say "party line", "dial tone", or "cell phone".

I usually give dates in a story, be the story about the past, present, or future. The dates give context to the plot and give the opportunity for the reader to imagine themselves in that time frame.

 

[Writer61]

What we write is limited only by our imaginations because technology is advancing at an exponential rate. Our imaginations are only limited by what we currently "know".

Arthur C. Clarke's third law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

 

[TheRedLantern]

My other writing is all cyberpunk, so this is a topic I've sunk many, many, many hours into contemplating.

My general philosophy when trying to answer Chloe's question is to imagine what happens when current technology gets a million times cheaper (if I were creative enough to imagine new world changing technologies, I would be a billionaire and pay someone to write horny stories for me). Fifty years ago, sending data wirelessly from a handheld device was very expensive. Today we use it to share cat pictures and argue with strangers.

Training the GPT models has required about $100 billion so far. In 60 years, that probably only costs $100,000. In 75 or 80, maybe $100. So people will be able to compress the entirety of human knowledge into a model for about what a steak dinner at a fancy steakhouse costs (if I'm wrong about any of this, it's probably how much it costs to eat like a rich person).

When I think about how that might come about, I start thinking analog circuitry and DNA computing. That second one could change things, as organic waste could become valuable for maintaining the DNA environment.

Computers should continue to get cheaper, up to a point, although paradigm shifts away from the CPU-based architecture might extend the implications of Moore's Law. Computers embedded in clothes to monitor the wearer's vitals, into glasses, spliced into bones and nerves, in trashcans and streetsigns. What are cities & towns going to be like when GPT-4 level reasoning is cheap enough to be part of everything?

And this is all JUST the physical implications of 1 thing. I haven't even touched on the fact that we're basically 1 bribe to a dementia-addled Supreme Court justice away from giving more rights to AI than most citizens have. When AI can own property, we're talking either bloody, worldwide revolution and a ground-up rewrite of social contracts (this is what counts as positive when it comes to cyberpunk/near future) or just accepting slavery as the default condition for 99.9% of us as AI outcompetes us in any financial market (basically The Matrix).

Mini particle accelerators that can assemble molecules from elementary particles and then feed 3D printers. Xenomedicine (eg, programmable cells). Economical fusion could be the biggest game changer since, like, fire.

F**k. This is already way too long and I've only said 1% of what I wanted to, and I rewrote it 3 times to cut most of what I wrote out. I'll stop.

 

[NuclearFairy]

Most of my short stories are technically set in the future, but I'm of the opinion that while technology might march on, what it'll look like in our homes will not change. So no one reading any of my stories would be able to tell that they're supposed to be in the future, and I never mention it as it's not important.

 

[Writer61]

This time, her bike is electric.

I assume an onboard fission reactor generated it.

 

[ChloeTzang]

What we write is limited only by our imaginations because technology is advancing at an exponential rate. Our imaginations are only limited by what we currently "know". My grandfather courted his to-be wife in a horse drawn buggy, and yet he sat in front of his television set and watched a man put his foot on the surface of the moon. If you'd asked him in 1920 if he thought that would ever be possible, he'd have laughed at you. That's because the extent of his knowledge only encompassed things that were currently present in the world. Anything beyond that was just fantasy.

Years ago when I spent one summer in the UK with my mom and dad, we were sitting in a pub in Devon and my dad got talking to an old guy there - he was fascinating - hed worked in the Brit aircraft industry and started off in the 1930's working on the old flying boats and helped design and build the Swordfish - an early British biplane naval torpedo bomber - and I remember he said something about working on the Hawker Hurricane and then on the first British jets, but what really stuck in my mind was that he was on the design team for the Concorde - he was retired for years when we met him, but there was a guy who started on wood and canvas aircraft and worked right thru to the Concorde over 45 or 50 years or whatever.

Mind you, I still find it hard to believe we landed on the moon in 1969, with the last cfrewed landing in December 1972, 50 odd years ago, and in that 50 years we have never even tried to return or do anything significant in space until Elon MUsk came along. Sooooooo short sighted. By now we should have had cities in space, moonbases, and be figuring out how to colonize Mars. SOmetimes progress is not fast enough. I guess what does make sense is that where we have made rapid progress, it's all been driven by the market, whereas deep space is so expensive that really only someone like Elon Musk could do it privately, and as Boeing has proved, govt funded really does not move anyhing like radically enough to make rapid progress.

 

[Writer61]

My grandfather sailed from the UK to Australia in 1911 in a journey that took several weeks.

I have travelled the same route many times, all in less than 24 hours. When I was there, it was cheaper to telephone home than it would have been for him to send a telegram.

 

[MrPixel]

...they access Pixboox at Samurai's on their smartphone. I invented things like Pixboox because I wanted a social media thing that could do whatever my plot needed a platform to do, without readers thinking, wait, Insta doesn't do that... and Starbucks went out of business last year... and everyone uses Android now...

Hah! Great minds. I've done the same thing with "TikiPix". Hmm. It just dawned on me there was a chapter keyed on Facebook groups with old friends. I also "created" an app (and website) for swingers in one story.

Which reminds me I need to register that website name, 'cuz I just mentioned it again. [Pause. Insert Jeopardy tick-tock theme music here.] Okay. Got it. Building website now.

 

[lovecraft68]

When you hear that Bill Gates wants to shoot particles into the clouds to block the sun we are living in what we used to think was Sci-Fi even twenty years ago