My Bullshit Histories, They Are Out Of Date
by xaosseed
Having my bi-decannual tilt at the windmill of ‘gonna write me a novel…’ and as part of that I’ve been rereading the first (97-98) effort which, amusingly, is a near future thing from back then which means its recent history now…
I am quite pleased that I called islamic terrorism as ‘the issue’ but I was way, way too optimistic on the march of technology on one hand and missed the behavioural stuff like once people have a mobile phone all arrangements become ad hoc… and if people are still ‘base station’-ing its because they’re using fat pipe for high bandwidth web use – if its just talk, that’s done on the move.
The classic cyberpunk crash is happening now, rather than a few years ago… the underclass never teched up, they’re still killing each other with iron-age analogues… the police never went ‘Tank Police’ in response…
Though the ‘monocycle’ I stole in turn from Venus Wars maybe on its way…
Comments
That thing’s still got two wheels, but it does look very stylish.
The ‘stone age’ tech of AK & RPG are still there because a) they work reasonably well & b) because there’s a flood of them and little else. Those tank police scenarios are only feasible when you have a far less realistic notion of the damage and more importantly the fear factor of basic guns. As Kindermord is wont to say, .45 is only a mid caliber in films & RPGs.
Near future is almost never actually about the future anyway. I have this theory that the further into the future most authors go, the more they are talking about the distant past.
(AK in this context is…?)
I agree – the further into the future you go, you’re getting the ‘advanced enough technology ~ magic’ point which means that the science starts to fade out and you’re back into the pure epic legend mode.
I think its better thought of as ‘near/far from readers experiences’ which is why for contemporary fiction you have many flavours from romances to crime to horror to standard fiction but then *every* type of tale shifted in time becomes lumped as another genre because it departs from what the reader could relate to.
For me, its down to how much you have to explain to people how the assumptions underpinning the world the characters move in depart from that of the reader – how does ones mindset change in a cornucopian society? In any post-contact society, the reaction to first contact was probably a big deal and strongly influenced everything after but is an unconscious factor in a characters thoughts…. and so on.