by Wil McCarthy
To write his newest story for Analog, Wil McCarthy found inspiration in current technology that may become obsolete in a month or even a week. According to McCarthy, the nonlinear and sometimes rapid progress of scientific development is one of the biggest challenges SF writers face today. Read “The Jangler” in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
My story in this month’s Analog, “The Jangler”, is extrapolated so tightly from current technology that I was (and am) at risk of being overtaken by actual events. Transcranial magnetic stimulation has gone from Frankenscience to insurance-will-pay-for-it formulary treatment in what seems like no time at all. Right now it’s mainly used for depression, and the protocols for PTSD (and a lot of other thought disorders) are still a work in progress. But still, this kind of ripped-from-the-headlines story is a risk for any writer of any kind of fiction—not just science fiction. Technology moves so fast these days that even mainstream literary writers are getting caught with their pants down.
The thing is, science and technology don’t advance along a smooth ramp, or even a staircase. Instead, you have teams of people working in the background, all the time, all around the world, chipping away at this or that perceived problem. Sometimes their progress is so incremental it looks like nothing is happening at all. This year’s cell phones don’t look that different from the ones they were making four years ago.
Sometimes the change is invisible, like when some quantum mechanic invents a new memory technology or a new type of LED, or some chemist finds a better/cheaper way to make graphene stick to silicon. Pretty soon that’s going to be in everything, but you and I may never know it.
Sometimes the progress is downright stupid, like when everyone thought we wanted to control our phones and computers and TVs by gesturing at them. We didn’t. We still don’t. Yeah, OK, there are edge cases where this is useful, but mostly not. But even this shit adds up. Take 10 years’ worth of incremental or invisible or stupid innovation, and the world really does look different. Yes, our wrists and pockets and cars hold a lot more computing power than they used to, but we also have access to more power, period. Solar panels got really cheap, really fast, and battery technology is starting to approach the energy densities of chemical fuel, which is why “battery fire” is slowly edging out “identity theft” as that thing that happened to a guy you know[1]. And gesture control? Well, it turns out that same accelerometer data, even in the absence of other information, can diagnose illness[2], locate potholes[3], uniquely identify us like fingerprints[4], and also reveal an alarming amount of personal data we never gave permissions for[5].
So, yeah, never mind the future; even the present is a moving target. Even very well-informed people are constantly blindsided by stuff that isn’t even particularly new. This makes writing science fiction (especially near-future hard science fiction) a rather hazardous occupation, where you put your reputation on the line every time you type a sentence.
Even this blog post may be obsolete by the time you read it.
Even very well-informed people are constantly blindsided by stuff that isn’t even particularly new. This makes writing science fiction (especially near-future hard science fiction) a rather hazardous occupation, where you put your reputation on the line every time you type a sentence.
But progress can also lurch forward in big, sudden chunks. OK, very often they aren’t sudden on the inside. Sometimes the work of patient years is made public, and all we see is the result. Example: Apple’s new augmented reality goggles. At $3K, they seem overpriced and out of step with the market . . . until you realize there’s an entire invisible Macintosh in there, with a keyboard and multiple giant video screens. It’s a $3,000 desktop computing rig you can carry around with you. The Vision Pro is not some knock-off of Meta Quest or even Microsoft HoloLens, although it can probably replace most of their functions. And no, I’m not shilling for Apple, here; I’m a Samsung/Xreal/Ticwatch guy myself. But that’s part of my point: my three-device AR/portable computing rig is mostly brand new, and already third-rate. So it goes.
And yeah, OK, ChatGPT-2, was around long before GPT-4 took the world by storm. But that’s what exponential growth looks like.
This makes the future a really hard thing to predict. To take any kind of holistic view, you’ve got to extrapolate a hundred different exponential trends, and throw in a couple of shocking game changers, just to show what 2033 is going to look like. In my RICH MAN’S SKY series, I’m currently struggling to write a sprawling near future that’s every bit as complex as the sprawling present.
For “The Jangler”, I took the opposite approach: a story as small as a single family. Because the future will be like that, too. I hope it provides some enjoyment for the Analog audience before, inevitably, it becomes a trite little parallel universe story where that sort of thing might have happened.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/29472/fires-caused-by-lithium-ion-batteries/
[2] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjWwsT96q__AhUhJH0KHSu9Bo0QFnoECAwQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mdpi.com%2F1424-8220%2F22%2F23%2F9122%2Fpdf&usg=AOvVaw3_AYMx7ZhvB9Uo4pF4-3qV
[3] https://devpost.com/software/detector
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S174680942200369X
[5] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3309074.3309076
The Astounding Analog Companion 