Inchoate Ascendant™: September 3, 2010.

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September 3, 2010

The Conundrum of Prescience and Prediction

I have a cyberpunk horror novel. I wrote it a while ago as of this blog entry and like many cyberpunk stories I tried to use my crystal ball and see the future of technology as I needed it for the story. The progress in science, medicine, and technology moves at a pretty serious pace most of the time when looking at a larger time scale, so it's only natural that even the most prescient thinking and well thought out predictions, even taking the current pace of advancement--never mind it's more exponential than it is an even rise--end up falling short. So the writer or futurist pushes the boundaries or just plain doesn't put that much serious thought into where specific technologies will be at the time their story is set in and ends up way off the mark--unless you have a rocket car already. The question is at what point do I look and consider updating things?

This is an immensely hard question. If a publisher had picked it up already, or even better yet within a short number of months of when I finished it then this would all be moot. Changing little things on the technology and social sides of the setting have implications that reverberate throughout the rest of the book. It could be a major retool. Things could break. Let's imagine for the time being though that nothing needs to be changed now and it was published--even if I had to take the plunge and publish it myself. What happens with the sequel if it takes any amount of time to be published--I haven't even begun actually writing it yet--and it requires the technical aspects to be retooled? Then there is a separation from one book to the next. It would then seem that it is better to leave things be and look at it from the perspective that even modern setting works may exist in alternate timelines, which is obvious from many a movie.

Music: Back To Madness by Stratovarius.