Archive
Looking to the future
Just before Christmas I came across a piece on the BBC website, ‘Futurology: The tricky art of knowing what will happen next’. And I’ve spent Christmas in a pensive frame of mind, wondering what kinds of predictions we might be able to make about the next fifty or so years.
The BBC piece is based on a 1972 book by Geoffrey Hoyle that’s recently been reissued, and to some extent the predictions made in it are less to do with scientific advances and more to do with social developments.
For example the book depicted everyone wearing jumpsuits, a style that back then, with the film of 1984 still in the public consciousness, had connotations of centralised planning and loss of individual liberty. A great deal of science fiction – and I assume this well known – is less about science per se and more about social and political critique, which is often carried in such apparently trivial details. So if I were to try to make any predictions, they wouldn’t be sweeping and scientific ones, they’d be relatively modest, devil-is-in-the-detail type ones.
If you want big and sweeping ones, earlier this year the New York Daily News (23 June 2010) carried a piece called ‘A Global Status Report: January 1, 2050 – predictions of year 2050 world scenario’. Among other things this concluded on the basis of a poll that more than 71% of the US population thinks cancer will be ‘cured’, 74% that most of our energy will come from renewables, 53% that ‘ordinary people’ will travel in space, almost 90% that a woman will be president of the US by 2050, and 69% that the president will be Hispanic (there’s no separate figure for the proportion who think there will be a Hispanic woman president by that tine). Oh, and 72% see a looming energy crisis while 59% think there will be another world war and 53% a major nuclear terrorist attack on the US.
Finally, to keep matters in perspective, 41% say that by 2050 we’ll see the second coming of Jesus Christ: whether that will happen before or after the energy crisis and the world war isn’t reported.
Certain predictions are almost not worth making. For example I wrote a short story some time ago in which people had jackets and other fashion items with communications technologies – phone and video – woven into the fibres. But of course such things already exist as prototypes, as followers of trendhunter.com will have seen.
So – my predictions? More socio-political than technological, I think.
1. Life will become more complex and interconnected, in an attempt to try to keep everything going. It will also become more random, as the resiliance of our systems against everything from the weather to volcanic ash and earthquakes to social protest and financial crises will be tested to the limit. The interconnectedness of systems will itself become problematic. That’s the thing about interconnectedness – when one system goes down, it affects everything it’s connected to.
2. Life will become more complex as rules and regulations increase. But mostly we’ll all end up ignoring the rules and regulations because they’ll become impossible to comply with, mutually contradictory, etc. We’ll find ways round them, multiple identities, whatever. Even today, a large proportion of crimes are seen on CCTV, but the proportion of crimes actually solved through CCTV is a bit over 1%. My prediction is just that phenomenon, writ large.
3. Small will be beautiful. Here’s a story. A music shop near me just closed. Trwenty years ago it was an independent store. It got bought up by a chain of stores, which was sold and re-sold a number of times to ever larger and more remote investment and venture capital companies. Eventually the local store was just a branch of a subsidiary of a company that was owned by some larger company that tried to micro-manage it and knew nothing about the music industry. So the company went bankrupt and the store closed quite suddenly. Now, round the corner from the empty shop unit, there’s a new small independent music company. That’s the microcosm; I can see a lot more of that kind of thing happening in the future.
4. Hats will become more popular. Especially ones with wide brims or veils that partly hide the face.
Any other thoughts, suggestions or predictions welcome!
Needs of the Dead
Theaker's Quarterly Fiction 34 front cover
A new short story – well, not new exactly since I wrote it a while back – is now out in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 34. Zombie stuff. I’ll have to read the rest of the issue now to find out what other authors have been up to!
Random bits and pieces
I’ve been away in London for a bit, and that means I’ve been off the keyboard. While I could technically check emails and blog from my mobile phone it’s a bit of a pain so I don’t bother.
Normally when I go away, I come back to a massive inbox of interesting and gratifying emails – stories accepted, enquiries about whether I can take on new projects, that kind of thing. It’s as though people wait until I’m not near the puter and then hit ‘send’.
This time… nothing. Oh well.
I have some pen-pictures of London – sadly I didn’t think to use the camera on my mobile to create an illustrated post…
It amused me, walking past Pentonville prison, that the cafe opposite is called Breakout. If you really want to see it, put ‘HM Prison Pentonville, London, UK’ into Google Maps and use streetview to look on the other side of the road – it’s there.
It also amused me (though you won’t see it Streetview) that in Stratford there’s a place offering ‘Fresh Mad Continental Coffee’. So did the signwriter screw up or is that what they sell? It reminded me of an old story about a shop with a deliberate mis-spelling on the sign, and the owner left it there because of the number of people who came in to tell him about it – and then bought something.
[rant]
On the whole, though, I find London depressing these days. For one thing you know who almost everyone is, because they’re all badged – virtually every workplace issues some form of ID and looking around as I walked the streets, somewhere between half and two-thirds of all the people I saw were wearing some form of ID. You can walk along fairly ordinary roads and pass CCTV cameras every few yards – crime prevention street cameras, shops, small factories monitoring their parking bays and so forth. Are there really people watching that many cameras? Given the statistics on how many crimes are prevented and detected, it seems like overkill, in fact almost like the contemporary equivalent of a talisman or fetish. And no, I’m not going to do the academic thing and quote figures, most of the relevant reports are available from the Home Office Research Development and Statistics website.
[end rant]
To cheer me up, though, it appears The Speculator issue 1 (the limited edition newspaper with SF/fantasy/horror stories in, including mine) is available as a PDF from here even though there’s no direct link to it yet from the Speculators WordPress front page, an oversight I think is intended to be fixed in the next few days.
Out soon – The Speculator
I’m an occasional, inconstant member of The Speculators, a Leicester-based SF/fantasy writing group that came up with the idea of an occasional newspaper-format publication with members’ stories.
Issue 1 of The Speculator is now printed, I’m pleased to say including one of my stories.
The newspaper as a whole has 17 short stories, a news article, editorial and a bunch of artwork, which is a lot for 12 pages.
The plan is to distribute the paper free at the upcoming Alt.Fiction event on 12 June, a one-day festival of alternative fiction including horror, fantasy and SF in Derby (UK). Thereafter, I think the idea is that the PDF will be available online from the Speculators website (no, it’s not there right now – be patient!).
Flash fiction – ‘Scream’ visible from space
Inspired by Google Sightseeing… for those outside the UK, ‘COBRA’ is Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, the name based on the usual location of crisis response meetings.
‘Scream’ visible from space
A satellite survey of electromagnetic emissions has revealed a strange image of the UK. Some commentators have likened it to the face in Edvard Munch’s famous painting ‘The Scream’. Others have suggested it looks like the face of a ‘Grey’, the type of alien being associated with the alleged crash landing of a flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
Conspiracy theories have already emerged in the internet. Some claim the image is a clandestine invitation to aliens to make contact. Others suggest the image means aliens have been in control of the UK for some time.
Dr Jon Vagg, head of SPACE, the School for Psychosexual And Cultural Evaluation, says: ‘People will always project their unconscious desires onto random images, much like the well-known inkblot tests used in psychology. In this case people are using the image to express their profound dissatisfaction with the extent of economic, social and sexual repression in current society.’
‘The image may prompt some groups in society to set up new types of social relationships and perhaps even to plan revolutionary or terrorist activity,’ he added.
By late last night the image had been removed from the satellite survey website though it had already been downloaded by millions of users.
Reliable sources say the government called a COBRA crisis response meeting early this morning, attended by several ministers, senior officials and unnamed external advisers. The agenda and discussion were confidential.
The plant that eats sheep (or: the virtues of patience)
About two years ago I half-wrote a SF story that concerned a retired space marine type character who returned to his home planet with a bunch of seeds, and the intention to spend his life gardening. Of course other stuff happened to him… However I reached a point at which I got stuck, other stuff was more urgent, and it’s been sitting patiently in my ‘works in progress’ file all this time.
I was watching TV coverage of the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show this week, and one of the things that got my attention was a display that included Puya chilensis, a large bromeliad (thus relative to the pineapple) native to the Andes.
Sheep-eating? Not quite, not exactly. But I’ll quote from Lindie Naughton’s blogspot: ‘There is a sinister aspect to the Puya: the margins of the leaves are edged with fiendish, hooked thorns. These are bad news for the weeding gardener, but far worse news for the sheep of the Andes. Woolly fleeces become easily entangled and a grazing sheep can find itself pinned helplessly to the fringes of the huge clumps of Puya like a piece of wind-blown fluff. Marooned, the sheep will perish from starvation. On the positive side, the unfortunate creature does provide a handy slow-release fertilizer for the Puya.’
So two years on, I’ve randomly come across something that (a) actually exists and (b) admittedly with some extension and adaptation, allows me to get on with the story – when I’ve finished the half-dozen currently stacked up in the queue, that is.
Success of the zombies
Just heard Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction will run a story of mine in the upcoming TQF 34, due out in June – though the website warns that Stephen is doing a lot of stuff for the British Fantasy Society so timing could slip a bit! Zombie fiction with a bit of a twist.
In other news: I’m not at the World Horror Convention, which is where I wanted to be – too much to do in the past few weeks, both writing and playing a minor supporting role in relation to a couple of family illnesses. I hadn’t been able to organise either booking a place at the con, or making the time to get there.
Instead I’m sitting here writing ‘proper’ stuff about the training of solicitors, barristers and paralegals, which is all surprisingly subtle and complex.
New story out
Story of mine is finally out in Dark Fire Issue 44, which is an online SF/horror magazine – or as they put it, ‘spooky tales to stun, amaze, entertain and send shivers down your spine’. A direct link to my piece is here.
I’m obviously slacking because checking my files it looks like I only have another four out on submission at the moment… on the other hand I’ve been kind of busy working on stuff that pays actual money!
Beware, the future has just arrived!
When I was about 14 or 15 I read a science fiction story, probably in Analog, in which the protagonist has a problem with his domestic appliances. They’re all coin-operated and won’t co-operate because he’s run out of change. In fact, he finds he can’t even leave his apartment because the rent is paid via a coin mechanism on the door every time he wants to open it.
This last point is just an extension of how doors in some public toilets used to work, but as to the domestic appliances – it’s intriguing how SF seems to be able to predict the future, or alternatively how anything SF writers imagine turns up as part of reality a decade or two later.
The reason this occurs to me is because something just came through the letterbox. No, not the stuff ordered from Amazon two weeks ago that was dispatched the same day and supposed to arrive last week (thanks, Royal Mail – and I’ve just been reading news articles about how once something isn’t delivered within the target time it gets added to the massive stockpile of delayed stuff, and there’s no target for clearing that so it can wait for weeks to get to you).
Okay, end of rant. What came through the letterbox was a leaflet: ‘Need a new TV, washer or fridge freezer? Pay in easy instalments via coin meter!’
The meter is apparently ‘discrete’ (I imagine they mean ‘discreet’) and emptied by a company representative once a month. I’m left wondering whether you have to pay every time you open the fridge freezer, or once a week, or whatever, and what happens if you don’t pay. Is the door locked, or does it turn off the power?
Frankly, I’m just hoping none of my stories end up presaging the future… If they do we’ll have 20% of the population turning into serial murderers or drug dealers, and everyone they don’t kill being attacked by vampires, zombies, aliens, or the ghosts of people who died in industrial accidents.
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