Normalcy is the future
Well, let's consider some consensus notions for the future of glamorous Webland. I totally dote on these, for a host of good reason. There are zillions of 'em, stuff like mobile robots, 3d printers, online video, locative tech, quantum computing, social networks. With an almighty effort, maybe we can concentrate on five.Words for Webstock - Bruce Sterling (via Making Light)The Cloud! Web Squared! The Internet of Screens! The Internet of Things! Augmented Reality!...
Here's what it sounds like: 1+2+3+4+5. When it's not futuristic. When it's normal. When it's banal.
She poured a coffee, then touched the breakfast table. "Where are my shoes?" "Your sister borrowed them." "Again? Where is Susan?" "She's downtown now." "Susan! Why did you swipe my favorite shoes again?" "Look at this dress." "Oooh, that dress is darling." "It would look even better on you." "You're right. Get it for me. You can't have it." "Trade you for these shoes." "Let me check that with Henry. Yeah, okay." Karen had another sip of fair-trade coffee. It tasted weird, but it was still hot.
They're all in that paragraph. All five. They're phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It's just: it doesn't look futuristic. It looks way too real.
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I met a guy recently who had a 1963 Triumph Trophy motorbike, fully restored. It was absolutely gorgeous, as if it had just left the showroom earlier that day. It's easy to look at the finished product and forget to remember what it took to achieve that result. So it is for so many things, including the march of computer technology.
I would imagine that the world 100 years from now really won't be all that astoundingly different from the world today, when you break it down to a comparison of our daily routines. It's a bit like driving in traffic, too: barring any unforeseen madness, things should run rather smoothly, and people living in that far-off distant time should be doing things pretty much the way they were when we left just a moment ago, when you began reading this.
To generate interest in this sort of thing requires you to touch upon speculation just enough to keep it alien, and create situations for that technology that are alien and maybe even a little bit scary, but to still present it with a sort of casual dismissal, as if it's simply how things are. Keeping such writing teetering on the edge of accessibility and clarity is a difficult thing, but when done correctly, it's impossible to stop reading.
Ugh.
I suspect he is right - it's a good prediction. I wish he were wrong, though.
I would like the future to contain some things that require some heavy lifting on the part of men - like supersonic air travel and a functioning network of high speed trains ... replacement teeth grown from skin cells and true, all organic joint reconstruction ... things like that.
But those are all real things that take real work, not just bullshit coding work that layers unnecessary complexity on largely unnecessary products. (I upload content to facebook from the cloud in the future instead of from my own machine ? Whee!)
If everything is free in the future, it's because we're nothing but consumers, and if everything is normal it's because we're bad consumers to boot.
http://motorbike-search-engine.co.uk/classic_bikes/triumph_tr6_1963.jpg
If I may respectfully suggest an alternate opening phrasing:
"Here're some inspiring words..."
or
"Here are some inspiring words..."
Oh no! What have you done to my lovely hi-tech future!!
/goes to the corner and start sobbing.
Damn you Sterling!Future was supposed to be cool!!!
/starts crying.
@anonymous #2, I suspect the things you mention will also seem pretty much invisible.
If you go to the dentist, he does stuff to your teeth, tells you to come back in two or three weeks while he sends stuff off somewhere to be done, then finishes up the next time (you hope) - is he doing dentures or replacement teeth grown from skin cells? As far as the patient is concerned, it's pretty much invisible.
Statistically you'll have better teeth, but there's not much "heavy lifting" in that story.
#2 - I think you're missing Sterling's point, slightly.
The sister in his little vingette might have taken a high-speed train to a downtown 100km away; they might all have vat-grown replacement teeth instead of fillings; that dress might have arrived by supersonic aircraft from elsewhere - but it's all transparent to the users. See Sabik's #6 as well.
From the point of view of either regular life or ordinary story, "He took the train to work" doesn't change much whether it's a 1880s steam train or a 2080s hi-speed maglev. It's just a train.
Shorter above: glamorous future becomes ordinary in short order. Rinse and repeat.
I've often held a similar idea about alien civilizations. They're always imagined as technological Utopias (with the exception of Alien Nation) filled with super-intelligent beings, but they have to have the same social problems that we do.
I'm sure, somewhere in the backwoods of Zanglox 5, there's a little green Chevy up on little green blocks, with little green weeds growing through it's little green engine.
Slightly more deflating is the green-and-blue marks that appear on the owner's little green wife after he's been drinking too much little green beer.
A functioning network of high speed trains isn't just in humanity's future, it's in its present and past too. Some countries have had such a thing for decades.
I want to hear more about Whitney Houston.
The future will have Whitney Houston in it. She'll be a genetically rejuvenated cyborg, of course, and will have an enhanced vocal range with built-in AutoTune, but we won't notice. She'll still be Whitney Houston, belting out The Greatest Love Of All in Central Park, as always.
And here I was hoping for a future where women get to talk about things besides shoes and clothes. Or where they don't have to check with someone male (boyfriend? husband? household computer?) before they 'buy' things. Sigh.
Here are things that might make a substantial difference in the daily routine, from least to most:
AI that can navigate the real world reliably.
Biotech that can efficiently replace arbitrary parts of the human body.
Biotech that can efficiently manufacture vast array of complex systems cheaply.
Mind machine interfaces.
Here is what wont make a difference: Gradual further improvement of the internet and related technologies and their implementation into ever more aspects of our lives. The internet revolution already happened. It's over. I have access to all information I want 90% of my day, all an iPhone would do for me would be fill in the gap. I am communicating instantaneously with people on the other side of the world. That we moved from text to audio to video doesn't mean much fundamentally. Everything that is ever discussed about the internets glorious future is not fundamentally different from its glorious present. It's incremental changes. It's filling in the gaps.
The internet revolution is behind us. That's why his example looks banal to us. It wouldn't have looked banal to someone 100 years ago. But then, what we have now wouldn't have looked banal either.
@13 Come on. I suspect women will always talk about shoes and clothes and men will always talk about motorcycles (see above). I hope there will also be men talking about clothes and women talking about motorcycles.
But in this context it's great literary technique! Thanks for pointing it out! I guess it's that choice of old cliches more than anything that makes it feel mundane and old. If you want to take this direction of thought further, to write a radical futuristic story, get rid of the current cliches! Write a social utopia! That will feel thoroughly unrealistic :D
Well, and being eaten by Morlocks was perfectly normal for Eloi. Sometimes it's the writer's job to instill wonder, horror or awe, even in the present day.
What Bruce hasn't revealed is that "Karen" is a seed personality rescued from an obsolete interstellar transport, going through reconstructive therapy as a virtual presence. Later, it will be allowed to play through Susan and Henry simultaneously so as to reintroduce gently back it to collective consciousness. (The joy at realizing the shoes and dresses were always hers is part of the therapy.) The therapist(s) are certain that gender had not been ameliorated before the seed was launched, so they are using antiquated sexism as a reawakening tool.
And being a rare necessity, the situation needn't even be humdrum-everyday for the participants.
Times are always a balance between the ordinary and the precarious to those living through them. This concept is presently with judicious panache in Diamond Age, juggled with clownish ineptness in Back to the Future 2— and even made an engine of cool in Cowboy Bebop. If Mr. Sterling wants to tell a banal story of a banal world, that's his problem; it needn't be anyone else's.
Now imagine a society revolutionized by a grammar editor that was omniscient...
reintroduce it gently back
is presented with judicious panache
I am immensely amused by this.
I love Bruce Sterling's work, just to get that said, and I agree with his statements.
We already live in a science fiction future world, and it is clearly taken as banal and ordinary by most everyone. We live in an age where there is a functional space station, and we get weather reports from Mars.
The average joe (like, say, me) has access to almost all of the knowledge the human race has acquired available to them without leaving the house, and can get anything legal (and many things illegal, I assume) delivered to their door.
Public discussions about geoengineering projects to control global temperatures and even weather are issues of policy and engineering rather than of ability. We have more than doubled our average life expectancy.
Maybe we are just in awe overload, or maybe we are just wired in such a way that novelty wears off really quickly. Either way, I can see how this would present a challenge to a writer of speculative fiction.
I'm still awed by a beautiful sunset though.
I have seen the future and the future is now. Of course, the future is also yesterday and also tomorrow. It will undoubtedly be different from now and the same as now. Or, as David Byrne puts it, "Everything that happens will happen today."
In the future, men won't be obsessed with sex and women won't be obsessed with making themselves look good.
Yeah.
How about:
Is this more futuristic?
That ought to be easy, right? It already happened, so we don’t have to make anything up. Let’s consider the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453). The big story back then? The English invade France, and they burn up everything including Joan of Arc.
That wasn't the story back then. In fact, the very term "Hundred Years War" is an attempt by historians to make sense of a series of wars, separated by years or decades of tense peace.
That's just the thing. The foreseeable future IS banal.
At this point, the biggest change for the biggest group of people would be to bring the 3rd world up to the level of the 1st world.
Even then, after you've made life so much better for billions, they'll all quickly get just as bored and despondent as the rest of us. We're doomed to a future of incremental updates that are only interesting for a short moment.
And the things that would be truly world-changing? Time travel, faster-than-light travel, discovery of aliens? Take a look at the current poll on Slashdot. Read that comment thread (it's a good one...).
The things most likely to make the future interesting are those least likely to happen. The future is already here, it's boring as hell, and interested parties are desperate for something exciting. What other explanation is there for the hubbub we'll see on Wednesday when Steve Jobs puts cameras in the iPod?
"the door dilated"?
I still have the delight of 'living in the future' (the future my child-of-the-80s self eagerly anticipated) when I am traveling overseas, pull my phone out of my pocket, ask it to tell me where I am, tell it where I need to go to, and watch it calculate the route on foot, by bike, in a car or by public transport. And then follow the little beeping light indicating 'me' so I know I'm going in the right direction. And, if I'm so inclined, I can also ask it to tell me where the best sushi restaurant is along the way. I am close enough to a past of having to carry paper maps, and ask strangers for directions, to experience the convenience of this as absolutely joyful.
Yes, it's all terribly ordinary, in the way that magical new things become ordinary really quickly once they're cheap enough for everyone to have access to them, but it's only unexciting if you have either a really short memory or were born in the late 90s.
I believe that the world is exactly as marvellous or mundane as we allow it to be. I can look at my laptop as a perfectly ordinary piece of not-so-current technology, or I can be awestruck at the fact that I've got a computer the size of a binder that lets me communicated with people all over the world at the speed of thought.
And for me, the quickest way to do that is to remember what things were like when I was a kid, playing games on my dad's Commodore 64. The mere fact that things like wifi are NORMAL is to me slightly mind-boggling.
Every age has its wonders. It's up to us to notice them.
"The foreseeable future IS banal."
That can mean two things, though, can't?
It can mean that the future will be banal. But it can also mean that only some of the possible futures are banal, and those are the ones that are foreseeable. In that case, there could be unforeseeable exciting possible futures!
Immortality, even a Red Queen's race actuarial escape velocity kind of immortality, would be a big change. We're in the middle of one demographic transition right now; the discovery of immortality would give us another.
BTW, I believe the third world now has less than one billion people — progress! However, I agree with the sentiment. There's still a lot of progress to be made there.
Remember kiddies - until some *really* significant genetic engineering happens, we're going to be stuck with the fact that even in well-to-do countries, a significant chunk of our lives gets spent doing banal things. We need to sleep 7-8 hours a day (that's a third of your life shot right there), find food several times a day, find facilities for excreting said food once we're done digesting it, and so on.
Supersonic jets aren't going to save me from having to find myself 20 or so meals a week. If anything, they'd make the problem *worse*. I have enough trouble deciding "chicken curry for dinner, or do I want to fix myself some pasta?". You start throwing in cheap transport, and then it becomes "chicken curry, or pasta, or farm-raised gazelle from Kenya, or ..."
As a complete reversal of that writing style, have a look at this old (very) short story, "If all stories were written like science fiction stories". It should raise a laugh from anyone who's read a SciFi author breathlessly driving home how excitingly futuristic their universe is.
Besides, we're already living in the future! Earlier today I was bored waiting in the queue, so I pulled a handheld, full-colour touchscreen device from my pocket, used it to rapidly search a global and all-encompassing network of computers for information about the film I want to watch this week (about a third of which will be photorealistic animation built from scratch inside a computer), got a map and aerial photographs showing the cinema, and had the options to press areas of the screen to phone, email or buy tickets directly. In the background, high-fidelity music was being played from a shiny plastic disc read by a frickin' laser. Then I came to work in a well-equipped research lab; some of the machines we use here are practically witchcraft.
I know this isn't really the point that the original post was making, but I don't really care. Besides, I can see relatively close technological developments making significant changes to the way we interact with the world, just like th internet has. The most obvious one is pervasive augmented reality, which could be used to tag objects and people with information (wiki-style or officially), project game environments or cool scenery over the real world, more realistic telepresence, etc.
@Bugs
I thought "A portable CD player? What is this, 1995?"
That sentence made your point better than the entire rest of your post, combined.
#7 & #15 get it right.
A complementary story: Frederik Pohl's "Day Million." A day in the life of two people living in 2737 A.D. They don't do anything transcendent or wonderous. The just bump into each other on the street, take a fancy to each other, and exchange . . . well, not phone numbers, but what today Pohl might have called VR images of each other, so they can have machine mediated sex at their convenience. Pohl throws in lots of other details that point out that as ordinary as the day is for them, we'd find it inexplicable and creepy.
She poured a coffee, then touched the breakfast table. “Where are my shoes?” “Your sister borrowed them.” “Again? Where is Susan?” “She’s downtown now.” “Susan! Why did you swipe my favorite shoes again?” “Look at this dress.” “Oooh, that dress is darling.” “It would look even better on you.” “You’re right. Get it for me. You can’t have it.” “Trade you for these shoes.” “Let me check that with Henry. Yeah, okay.” Karen had another sip of fair-trade coffee. It tasted weird, but it was still hot.
Technology always has its price: let us not forget the banality of evil.
Will that eavesdropping table transmit your kitchen conversation to the powers that really wanna be there?
Is that dress size a little too big for the latest community health guidelines? (Ve haff vays uf makink you eat der right foods, yah?) Does it have your proper RFID chip woven into the tag? (Do not remove under penalty of law!) Do you have enough credits in your account to purchase this extravagant clothing? (Your work time this month is deficient: another 16 hours is required.)
Have you already brewed your ersatz coffee ration for this week? (No more coffee for you!)
What we need is a future with dumber machines and smarter people who don't need all this stuff. Remember the Eloi.
Certhas (#13): But in this context it's great literary technique! Thanks for pointing it out! I guess it's that choice of old cliches more than anything that makes it feel mundane and old.
I agree, and you're right that it was quite likely a conscious decision on Sterling's part: using dialogue from the past to make the future feel like the present.
Now if only most sci-fi writers could understand this.
Instant communication. OK, whatever.
I'm not sure if the author is criticizing others for writing about something boring, or making the same mistake himself.
http://digg.com/comedy/Everything_s_Amazing_Nobody_s_Happy_5
I'm sorry, is your CHAIR IN THE SKY not comfortable enough?
The future will always be banal, for two very important reasons:
1) The future is, by definition, always in the future. I.e., we'll never be there.
2) Even if we were to arrive there by some miracle, well, we would be there.
Here's a somewhat related article on the brain's compulsion to seek the new and then be dissatisfied with it, exposing the difference between what the author terms "wanting" and "liking": http://www.slate.com/id/2224932/pagenum/all/
This is likely related to the experience most of us probably experienced as children, when there's something you want so, so desperately, and then you finally get it, and you're excited for a very short time, and then it ends up on a shelf while you play with an empty carboard box instead.
Pragmatically the only long term accuracy in futurism is Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson.
They collectively created now as an act of will using portmanteau word magic.
Well, it certainly is going to seem banal to us. To someone who is used to what was a generation or two behind it - it may not seem so banal. For instance, the Wright Brothers invented an airplane that could only travel a few hundred yards at a time. Now, we have an aircraft (the Space Shuttle) that is lifted out of this planet and returns under it's own power. They probably would not have considered it banal, if they would have been told of it.
The immediate future, or the foreseeable future will always appear banal to those in the present. It's the same principle of cooking a frog. Put him in boiling water and out he hops. Into cool water, and he will allow you to boil him to death. If you told someone that worked with the earliest generations of computers about Twitter you probably would have blown their minds. Ever since the days of AOL, Yahoo, et al, instant message programs...not as mind blowing as someone else would find it. You get acclimated to a particular environment, so gradual changes to that environment over time are not as noticeable as drastic ones.
I think a lot of people have an similar relationship to the past - look at Civil War Reenactments, Society for Creative Anachronism, the various Renaissance Fairs - excuse me, Faires - a lot of people think the past would have been a more exciting time to live, or something along those lines. Which is ridiculous - if you actually read history, you get a picture of what life for the commoner instead of the wealthiest 10%, and it loses appeal - rapidly. Take the film 300, for instance - you have a bunch of young males going around saying they wish they were Spartans - when in reality, the people you see in the film were only 5% of the Spartan population. 95% of the ancient state of Sparta was comprised of Helots - slaves.
Essentially, the grass is always greener over the next or previous hill than the present one. It's a fact of life.