The irony of watching Prime’s Upload in VR is not lost on me. It is in fact intentional. I wanted to reflect on the massive improvements in technology over the past 40 years while simultaneously enjoying that tech and a dissection of that tech being streamed right to my seat as I stationary bike my way to a semblance of better health. Lately it feels like science fiction is a reflection of ‘just around the corner’ though the distance between here and there is categorized by invasive surgeries that, up till this point, have not been formally legalized. Well, some have. Implanted credit chips have been a reality for years. All this is to say that I, as a science fiction writer, have serious thinking to do.
I’ve been asking myself what story I am trying to tell. Generally speaking it has been the story of a young kid bristling with raw talent who is thrust into a leadership position that ultimately defines him as someone he’d rather not be. As such he is left to figure out who he wants to be while toting around that responsibility of leadership and trying to merge those two lives. In other words, I write about me. A lot. It is long past time to move beyond that story–especially considering that I don’t tell it very well. Instead I’ve started to take on other ‘responsibility’ tales, most of which seem to be born from that core of my youth experience.
Tech factors into what I do, because I grew up at the intersection of technology and society. I grew up alongside the internet. I created multi-user dungeons when they were still in their infancy. I still have notebooks full of handwritten code and dot-matrix printouts of even more code properly stored in three ring binders. My past was science fiction. So what is my future? What is the future I am predicting or even warning about through my writing? I’m not quite sure. More thinking is required.