A believable (nearish) future

When I set out to write a novel set in the future I was convinced I could do so with authenticity. The prospect excited me. But now that I'm trying to put this into practice I find myself falling into a series of cliched visions.

In the main, I'm only interested by earth-bound sci-fi - futuristic speculative fiction, if you like - and find myself irresistibly influenced by things I've seen in movies and read in other books. This means old ideas like Chinese lanterns, rainy streets, neons, hologram advertising. In truth the only one of these that actually features in my setting in the last, but I use the others as examples that I have to force myself to avoid.

All this may suggest I simply lack vision, originality and/or imagination, but I think it's a little more complex than this.

I've looked into what the experts predict will be our future; tech, medical advancements, etc, and have managed to implement a couple of these already, but it's the little hints of a future world I'm struggling to dot throughout the story - the kind of things you would naturally include in a room or street description, if the setting was present day.

I've read the advice many times that a writer should surprise themselves by introducing an element that is way way out there - something their brain wants to reject because it's too OTT - but whenever this happens in a book I'm reading it disappoints me, suggesting the advice wouldn't work for me.

In short, I'm aiming for obvious but subtle, but I'm not sure I'm pulling it off.

 

Well, one thing to keep in mind when reading about predictions of what our future might look like is that people have a tendency to look at today's world and extrapolate in a linear fashion, even though when looking at history, progress never goes in a straight line. It's two steps forward, one step back. And a lot of those crazy futuristic ideas, in my mind, start to fail once you start taking into account all sorts of practical considerations, such as economics, human limitation, political limitation, etc.

For example, a lot of futuristic settings have us driving in flying cars. And all I can think is, people can barely drive well in only two dimensions. They then want to add a third dimension to that? That will end badly.

Yes, there will be all sorts of advancements in technology, but how fast those will happen, I tend to think most advancements will take longer than a lot of people think or hope.

What if there is some sort of major crisis where suddenly all technological progress stops, or is put on hold for several years? What if there is a world war that breaks out and technological progress is mainly focused on military progress, but not on anything else? What if there is just plain old greed, like we see today, where technological progress is just very focused to benefit the few over the many?

Anyway, all things to consider in my mind. I've started writing a book where the setting is ~50 years into the future and I'm taking all these things into consideration, where the future is not as fantastical as so many predictions out there. But the story I'm writing is not really about the future, it's just in a future setting.

 

If you make any fictional future radically different to present day, then I think you need to be meticulously detailed and consistent to make sure it's all clear and makes sense. Think Star Trek - it's a radically different future, but all of the tech makes sense and has actual scientific backing to make it plausible. Alluding vaguely to things which seem far removed from present day reality could make it hard for the reader to identify with the setting.

I'm writing a near future SF, and I don't want to go into such detail as I don't want it to distract from the plot. So I've chosen a few core technologies which are quite core and which recur in various ways. One is a subdermal implant which most of the characters use for various reasons, another is holographic displays, and a final one is a quantum computer. These are all things which are either possible now, or will be possible in the near future, so they don't need a huge amount of explaining to be believable.

The other thing to mention is that technology isn't the only thing you need to consider when creating a fictional future. You also need to think about how people will live their lives, which means considering economics, politics, globalisation..... a whole range of things. And of course all of these will interact with technology, and that is what will make your fictional future interesting.

 

Thanks, both. I think, or at least hope, I'm following most of the above advice already. It's still reassuring, though, to know I'm heading in the right direction.

 

You could post some extracts in the workshop for critique if you want to check you’re on the right track. Feel free to tag me if you do so - I’m a massive SF fan and would gladly give feedback. Though, it might be difficult to tell depending on the length of the extract, since world-building takes time.

 

I might just do that as the current scene I'm writing is bogging me down a little. I want to suggest signs of modern tech in an otherwise basic and somewhat old fashioned room, but I want to do so without ramming it in the reader's face.

 

The thing that makes technology hard to predict is that it goes through cycles of paradigm shifts followed by optimization.

It's likely that we'll experience some massive technological surge that'll throw any predictions completely out of wack.

The singularity is the most obvious. We don't know when it's going to be or what the exact technology will look like but we'll certainly be able to create technology that improves on itself. Once you reach that point, any models go out the window, that's what "singularity" means, you can't make sense of anything past it.

 

That's fair enough, but I think it's important to remember this is fiction I'm writing, not an academic paper on the future of earth.

I know I stressed authenticity, but futuristic fiction is about imagining what might be. Some prefer to let their imaginations run amok and go so far into the future that anything goes, but even when the setting in the near-future we still need to paint a picture of what might be, otherwise we may as well set the story in present day.

 

One thing I do for setting up the near future is look at what the world looked like that distance in the past. If my story takes place twenty years in the future (2037ish), I'll look at the world in 1997. What was the technology then? How has it changed? Cell phones were bricks then, and have gotten smaller and smarter over time. How could I continue that trend into my story?

Maybe cell phones are the size of a Bluetooth ear piece in 2037, with a Google Glass-esque interface. It takes some guesswork to see where the technology might go. There have also been major world events since 1997 that have changed policies and procedures. I used an airport in 1999, and then again in 2014. I was surprised by the differences created by 9/11. Depending on the events in the history of your world, policies and procedures will influence the implemented technology.

 

Yes, this is a technique I sometimes look at, but it's not infallible. Take your cell phone logic. If we apply that they'll be the size of your average front door thirty years from now. The trend is for bigger phones, not smaller, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

A couple of years ago I tried desperately to find a good, small, current smartphone and it was impossible. They don't exist now.

 

The future will not be cool.

 

That was fascinating read, and much food for thought. I can see the author's logic and agree with much of it.

It does cause a problem, though, when writing near-future fiction, and an even bigger problem when writing distant-future fiction. Other than putting a distant year in the heading of chapter one, how to do we announce the future setting? if we just paint a picture of an earth will little to no change, readers may criticise the book for having a setting no different to present day.

Also, we write (and read) future fiction because an imagined piece of new tech serves as a vehicle for a plot that wouldn't be possible without it.

 

My approach with this would be to not announce the future setting for the sake of it, but to just have it interspersed throughout the story, as part of the world building. As the reader progresses, he/she will slowly start to paint a mental picture with all sorts of little details you add here and there. It may not even be immediately obvious that it's a future setting, but eventually they'll notice that certain things are different from the present day.

And otherwise, I want my future to sound as mundane as possible. A smartphone might seem like magic to someone from 1903, but to us it's just a tool, a fairly mundane thing (even though so many people stare at it non-stop). And any MC we have in the future will likely treat it just like that. And, technology will never be perfect. Our smartphones crash sometimes; they need to reboot, or an app will crash and we lose some data. That will be no different in the future with whatever technology we have then, as nothing is ever perfect. We might have information beamed directly onto our retina by then, superimposed over our vision, but it will probably still crash every now and then, forcing a reboot. So there you are sitting at your office desk, a 100 years from now, ready to start working on your novel. You have your moment of inspiration and are ready to record it, in whatever format people use then, and then it crashes and you have to wait another few minutes. Sigh. Some things change while other things will always remain the same.

 

He is not saying that things aren't going to change. The advice is: instead of 'adding' (shiny gadgets, genetically engineered ape-butlers), try 'subtracting.' Make the technologies we have today less conspicuous.

 

I'd also consider having the protagonist discover many futuristic faces of a different world but then being drawn intellectually only to one realm/face for you to focus on, so the experience of time-travelling becomes as rich and mysterious as the concept of time-travel itself.

 

Not quite with you on this one, @Abishai1000. I'm not sure if you're talking about time-travel symbolically or literally. If it's the former then you need to elaborate on what you mean, if you mean the latter then you need to know my future doesn't feature time-travel.

 

Oh, I meant that the reader was 'travelling through time' (not necessarily a time-machine device in the plot). My suggestion is in reference to the notion that taking apart elements in a futurama-tale makes it more efficient to deal with various components/technologies in the story more carefully. You'll notice the Doctor Who writers take this approach, and it helps their stories come out overall sensible even when it seems they have to jam in a bunch of futuristic objects/gadgets in one scene!

 

This, most definitely this.

In 1850, a group of scientists at a summit were asked what the biggest problem would be in 1950. Their response? Too much horse manure in the streets. They foresaw the earth getting hugely overpopulated, so they assumed there would be a gigantic amount of carriages in the street, with all the horses leaving a trail of feces behind them. And then cars happened.

Depending what you mean by "nearish" you could look through the technology we have today, including the struggles. For example, despite all of our greatest technological marvels in the last several decades, the battery lives of our electronics still suck. And the middle class people aren't going to have the highest end technologies, as they always cost large amounts when they're first introduced. So you can have futuristic technologies, but give them glitches or cultural issues/implications. It's like giving a character weaknesses so he's not too OP.

 

I know this is going to be an odd suggestion, but, I would recommend the Adam Shandler movie 'Click'. The story was about how the MC was able to 'fast forward' through his life. The movie wonderfully showed the progression of his life by the change of technology. My second suggestion is to look into the writings of H.G. Wells. One of his books, 'The War in the Air' that I believe was published around 1908, showed an industrial war raged globally through the air. While the technology was off (he predicted fleets of air ships), the impact of weapons of mass destruction foreshadowed not only the aerial bombing of WW2 but also the nuclear age.

 

This makes no sense, considering that 2017 is pretty cool and fundamentally different compared to 1930. We're not just looking at expanding technology, but expanding technology coupled with an expanding economy. Not sure how you can predict things, but you certainly can't predict them by looking at the past.

 

You mean the age of giant clanking trains, airships and trench warfare?

That's not remotely what he's saying.

 

I think the point about looking to the past is that predictions made in the past about the future were usually wildly off. That in itself should be a lesson that technological progress is typically more mundane, with every now and then a revolutionary breakthrough (such as the Internet). For example, the car is essentially still the same today as it was 100 years ago. It has four wheels, an engine, and a steering wheel. They've added more bells and whistles, but it's still the same thing. We don't have flying cars, and we probably never will as the energy required to get something up in the air is much much more than to just get two or four wheels to start moving over a hard surface. It's just not economically viable.

We do have talk of self-driving cars now. Call me cynical though, but I think it will take a lot longer than a lot of people believe before those are ubiquitous. You still see people driving cars from the 60s/70s/80s today, so 50 years from now you'll still see people driving cars from the 2000s/2010s/2020s. And I'm just waiting for the first accident involving a self-driving car, where the self-driving car is at fault, and people will scream bloody murder, and adoption of those vehicles will be significantly delayed, if not banned for a while.

And that goes for a lot of those fantastical predictions being made now about what the world will look like 50 years from now; they probably aren't realistic once you take into account what it will all cost. Who will be willing to invest in that? Will there even be a market for it? Will people even want it?

We have an expanding economy today, but not everyone is benefiting equally. I doubt that will be very different 50 years from now. Like I said in an earlier comment, some things change, while other things will always stay the same. The future is not utopic, nor is it dystopic, it's just more of what we have today, with fancier gadgets that make people's lives perhaps a little bit easier. But, we could have a Mars colony by then if Elon Musk is to be believed, so that's pretty cool

 

You'll have to elaborate.

 

If you're interested, this is a really great exploration of what past predictions got wrong and why.

Yeah, people always like to feel in control even if it makes them less safe. Any future technologies are going to reflect that.

He's saying that technology which has lasted for thousands or hundreds of years probably have reasons for doing so that aren't immediately obvious to us. They're better, easier for our brains to parse, or healthier. Those technologies might be displaced by more efficient technologies, but eventually we shoehorn in aspects of the originals.