The publication of Anasazi-35 has stimulated some interesting conversations, so I think that it deserves a little more attention. I’m going to post several exegetical articles, covering different aspects of the story. Today, I’m going to talk about how Anasazi-35 approaches technology.
So a few years ago, I had this roommate who owned one of the first Blackberries. Right after he got it, he came up to me as I was minding my own business, trying to conceptualize how the world will work in the near future, and he shoved the phone in my face and said, "Imagine something that this thing can do, and it can do it."
Needless to say, as an aspiring science fiction writer, this was a very threatening statement. So I replied, "Can it cross-correlate facial recognition with social networking and reputation systems?"
He scowled at me and stalked off to work on the problem.
The lesson I took from this experience is that it’s a fool’s game to anticipate front-end applications. It’s likely that anything you imagine will either be totally wrong, or i will become reality long before you can get the story published.
When I wrote Anasazi-35, I took it as read that there will be near ubiquitous and practically invisible computing and networking. The exact interface won’t be as interesting as the way that social groups will use that ubi-comp for collective organizing and decision making.
That’s why I didn’t describe how the characters interact with their networking hardware. A lot of people who’ve read this didn’t like that. They wanted to hear about the mirror shades and the brain implants and the laser retinal projectors or whatever.
Personally, I think that would have been a huge mistake. There’s no interface I could imagine that wouldn’t sound dorky six months from now. Hell, it would probably sound dorky now.
And on top of that, the characters themselves would be taking the technology for granted, so there’s no point in having them dwell on it. Could you imagine a modern novel that described in detail how to use an iPhone? "He took an oblong tablet out of his pocket. It was no larger than his wallet, yet it had the processing power of an 1980s era Cray supercomputer. By pressing his finger against the glowing cartoon animations on the face, he could access software that would turn his ordinary voice into a perfectly tuned melody."