Cory Doctorow: Making Smarter Dumb Mistakes About the Future

Last Christmas, my family took a trip to Walt Disney World, and, as is now-traditional, I dragged them onto the Carousel of Progress, the beating heart of Tomorrowland. The Carousel began life as a GE exhibit at the 1964 World's Fair, a watershed moment for Disney's theme park business, since the Fair's sponsors could be persuaded to part with big bucks that WED, the engineering arm of Disney, could use for R&D on new ride and exhibit technology. GE's Carousel of Progress bankrolled the robotics R&D that gave us the Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion, and other animatronic-intensive theme park classics.

The Carousel of Progress is one of my all-time favorite Disney attractions — I even wrote a long novella about it, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now Is the Best Time of Your Life" for Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming anthology Godlike Machines. Here's the gimmick: you are loaded into a theater shaped like one wedge of a pie, with a stage before it. The curtain parts, revealing robots depicting a family from the turn of the 20th century, who do a little singing and gag-telling schtick about the promise of electricity. The lights come down, and the theater rotates around the stage, moving to the next scene (meanwhile, in the next wedge-shaped theater over, a new group has just been loaded into the opening segment). Around and around you go, viewing three sequences about the progress of technology in the 20th century, with special emphasis on the role that electricity (and GE) played in the American century.

Then you come to the grand finale, a segment depicting the near-future of technology. In the original, 1964 incarnation, this focused on some marginally speculative GE products, like self-cleaning ovens, electric dishwashers, and hi-fi sets, as well as such safe predictions as passenger jet service. This final sequence aged rather badly and had to be re-done for the Carousel's 1967 installation in Disneyland's Tomorrowland, which also had the problem of being routinely overtaken by tomorrow.

The current generation of the show, dating to 1994, was slightly more ambitious in its futurism, but much, much more wrong about the future it predicted. Its finale opens upon Christmas eve, 1999, where the family has gathered for its annual tryptophan orgy. There's a tree, a flat-screen, HD set, a video-game console with a VR headset and glove, and a laptop in a little nook off to the side. In the course of a brief sketch, we see the whole family gather around the electronic hearth to first watch Grandma beat the pants off junior at Space Ace, then the Disney World Christmas fireworks. Dad programs the voice-activated electric range to cook the turkey (he still managed to burn it), and uses the house's home-automation system to dim the electric lights on the tree. And Mom sits with her laptop and laughs along with the gang.

This five-year-out prediction got pretty much every single detail of 1999 wrong, and badly so. What's more, they got it all wrong in a way that is particular to all forms of bad science fiction, especially that most profitable of subgenres, corporate futurism.

Let's take a look at some of the fallacies in the 1999-of-1994 depicted in the Carousel:

LIKE TODAY, BUT MORESO

When confronted with a new technology and asked to predict its application, it's tempting to look for existing, unsolved problems to which the technology might apply. For example, in a notorious early ad for personal computing, Honeywell depicted a satisfied, modish hausfrau cheerfully setting the dip-switches on her kitchen's PC in order to recall recipes. It's easy to follow their thinking: Computers are used by giant companies to store and manipulate files in the workplace. What files do housewives have to store and manipulate? Recipes! This is the "horseless carriage" fallacy: tomorrow's world will be like today, but moreso. Faster transport will get us to the same places, but faster. Faster communications will let us talk to the same people, but better.

So it's natural to think that HD television will be twice as unifying as old, standard-def sets (in fact, one of the big selling points for HD is that it will allow a small percentage of the household, usually Dad, to watch sports matches with his friends, while the rest of the family waits it out somewhere else).

JUST ENOUGH, AND NO MORE

Call this one the Fallacy of the Entertainment Industry, for they have committed this sin more publicly than anyone else. This is the idea that technology will develop enough to achieve some end, and then stop. For example: microchips and optical drives will progress to the point that everyone can afford to have half a dozen CD players around the house, but they won't become so advanced that home users will be able to rip them to MP3, load them into minuscule personal media players, and share them over the Internet. Or: microchips and networks will become so ubiquitous and cheap that we'll be able to provide video-on-demand services to the home, but not so cheap and ubiquitous that viewers will be able to share the same shows online.

THAT'S NOT WEIRD, IT'S DUMB

Thinking weird is important if you're going to get the future right (imagine trying to explain World of Warcraft to the attendees at the 1964 World's Fair), but "there's such a fine line between clever and stupid." For example, home automation systems are still looking for a home (so to speak) and they may never find one. But the applications imagined by the Carousel — dimming Christmas tree lights and reprogramming the oven — aren't weird, they're just dumb. If you have the physical strength and coordination to actually put a turkey in an oven, then you have the wherewithal to press some buttons on its front to set the time and temperature. And who ever heard of wanting to dim the Christmas tree lights?

I don't know how to predict the future, and I never will. But I do know how not to predict it: don't stick to your boss's comfort zone by predicting that doing exactly what you're doing now is exactly the right thing to do forever.

Like I said, the Carousel is one of my most cherished Disney park attractions, and with good reason. As a science fiction writer, it's hard to imagine someone making a better example of exactly how the future can go wrong. I only wish they'd restore the 1964 show, along with the miniature domed city after the show, through which Mother and Father narrated the joys of their Jane Jacobs nightmare town, with its strictly regimented planning and zoning.

Getting the future wrong has consequences, as the rustbelt and its displaced industrial workforce can attest. We could do worse than to study how that happens.

Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.



Previous Cory Doctorow columns posted on Locus Online:

• Close Enough for Rock 'n' Roll
  
• Teen Sex
  
• Special Pleading
  
• Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise
  
• Extreme Geek
  
• In Praise of the Sales Force
  
• Writing in the Age of Distraction
  
• Why I Copyfight
  
• Macropayments
  
• Nature's Daredevils: Writing for Young Audiences
  
• Think Like a Dandelion
  
• Put Not Your Faith in Ebook Readers
  
• Artist Rights
  
• Creative Commons
  
• Free(konomic) E-books
  
• The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights
  
• In Praise of Fanfic
  
• You Do Like Reading Off a Computer
  
• Blogging Without the Blog
  
• The March of the Polygons: How High-Definition Is Bad News for SF Flicks
  
• How Copyright Broke
  
• Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet.
  

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

Felix Gilman: : Making the World Stranger

Felix John Gilman was born in London and grew up in the south London suburbs. He attended school in Seven Oaks, Kent, and read in history at Oxford for three years, then got a master's degree in "Elizabethan stuff," graduating in 1996. After working briefly for a small London publisher, he moved to the US to live with his wife Sarah. They resided in Washington DC for a couple of years starting in 2000, where he worked as a writer for a telecommunications business publication. He then attended Harvard Law School. He has worked for the federal courts in New York and in private practice.

First novel Thunderer appeared in 2008, followed by sequel Gears of the City (2009). A History of the Half-Made World, first in a new series, is forthcoming.


Excerpts from the interview:


“I grew up in Bromley, South London. Bromley is the location of large parts of Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time, as an archetypal incredibly dull London suburb. H.G. Wells grew up there, and he used it as his archetypal dull London suburb. I always read science fiction and fantasy, but I started writing relatively recently. (Well, in my early twenties I had various abortive efforts, but I never managed to summon up the energy to get much past five pages into anything.) Around 2006, I had a slightly odd situation in which I had six months to fill before I started a new job. I started trying to write legal academic things, a project which I then lost interest in, and I also started a fiction project. I thought, 'I have six months, so I have absolutely no excuse for not sitting down and writing a novel.' So I did.

“Because I didn't have any substantial (fiction) writing experience when I started, I had no idea how much space any particular idea would take. I started Thunderer with a handful of ideas which were not fleshed out, and for about four months I shut myself up and worked on that. It was very much a learning-as-I-went-along process. I didn't know what I was doing, but I produced a first draft that I gave to people, and later it went through at least two rounds of major revisions.”

*

“The gigantic city is obviously central to Thunderer. I don't think I made a conscious decision that the book should be city-based. When I started writing a book, I just took for granted that it would be set in a city. I don't know anything about what happens outside of cities.

“But if I had to reconstruct my subconscious motives (since you ask) I'd say the following. The things that interest me in world building are the entertainment or culture of the world, or the academy, or the newspapers: what are they like? Or the politics in the sense of the day-to-day ideas and ideologies and unexamined notions and slogans people carry around in their heads. And to develop these things through contrasts, through things knocking and rubbing against each other. The denser and more knotted the more interesting. Hence: cities. (I am not claiming success in this goal or even that the final product even aims as high as all that. But something like that was the drunk/manic-upswing pitch-to-self.)”

*

“There are different kinds of world building. There's the kind that focuses on making the physical details real, and the texture of the culture the characters inhabit. That's something I want to do, and I think it's really interesting trying to create textured worlds in that sense -- which is very different from the huge architectural level of deciding, 'This goes here and this goes here; this is the continent with the elves, and this is what dragons do.' (As a lawyer, I have written and then thrown away extensive passages on made-up legal systems. A little of that got in. Not much. Turns out there's not much of an audience. Oh well.)”

*

“In September, I have something coming out from Tor which is very different. I didn't want to write another city book, didn't feel like creating another gigantic setting. And I wanted to try my hand at something which had a more straightforward plot. I've been accused of overplotting and underplotting, but this one has a clearer plot. It's called A History of the Half-Made World (first of what will be either two or three books), and up to a point it's like a fantastic western. It's a purely invented world, though the fantastical elements are mostly limited to two weird and inhuman factions which sort of divide the world between them. They're archetypes of something or other, probably. The book has the frontier theme, the theme of the founding and various falls from grace, but I don't want to describe it as purely an American history thing, because that sounds like it's more closely tied to American history than it is. It plays with certain tropes, let's say.”

Comments are welcome...

Jo Walton: Feral Writer

Jo Walton was born in Aberdare, South Wales. She went to Lancaster University, graduating with a degree in Classics and Ancient History in 1986. She married roleplaying game writer Ken Walton in 1990 (divorced 1997), and married current husband Emmet O'Brien in 2001. She has an adult son, Alexander, from her first marriage. She and O'Brien moved to Quebec, Canada in February 2001.

Walton's debut novel The King's Peace (2000) began the Sulien series, which also includes The King's Name (2001) and The Prize in the Game (2002). World Fantasy Award winner Tooth and Claw (2003) is a Victorian novel of manners in the style of Anthony Trollope, with dragons. Her Small Change series is an alternate history about a Fascist Britain: Farthing (2006), a Nebula, Campbell Memorial, Quill, and Sidewise Award finalist; Ha'penny (2007), a Prometheus Award winner and Lambda and Sidewise Award finalist; and Half a Crown (2008), a Sidewise, Sunburst, and Prometheus Award finalist. Her latest book is fantasy Lifelode (2009), and Among Others is forthcoming. She also wrote poetry chapbooks Muses and Lurkers (2001) and Sibyls and Spaceships (2009), worked on roleplaying game supplements with Ken Walton, and has placed a handful of short stories, articles, and poems in genre publications.

Walton won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002.


Excerpts from the interview:


“I started writing seriously when I was about 13. I discovered that I could not read 'how to write' books, so I'm a feral writer: I taught myself how to write. From 13 to about the age of 22, I wrote seven or eight novel-length things which are all uniformly awful. When I got together with Ken, he told me I was just hopeless and I should stop, so in my twenties I stopped seriously writing -- I only wrote a little bit of poetry that I couldn't help, and the occasional little bit of a novel. When I write the beginning of a novel, it just comes out. Then you get to where you've got to work at doing it! In that time when I 'wasn't writing,' I would write ten-thousand word beginnings of novels in a weekend, then think 'No, this is silly and terrible. Why am I doing this?'”

*

“The King's Peace is sort of Arthurian set in another world with the names changed, historical fantasy the way Guy Kay does it. But I call sequel Prize in the Game my 'nonselling novel'. I had a contract to write another historical fantasy, but I didn't want to, so instead I wrote Tooth and Claw.

“That one had a rather odd beginning. I was halfway through a Trollope novel when a fantasy that I had ordered came in at the library, so I switched to reading that. Emmet came home from work and asked, 'How is your book?', and I said, 'It's fine except that it doesn't understand dragons.' He looked at me as if I was completely mad, because the last he'd seen I was reading The Small House at Arlington. And I said, 'Oh, Trollope understands dragons perfectly -- it's just that he doesn't understand people.' That's basically the entire concept of Tooth and Claw. It's got all those things which, when you read a Victorian novel as a modern feminist (or even just a modern person), are quite appalling, and yet the novels are entertaining and kind of cool. I just made it about dragons.

“In Victorian novels, women can only fall in love once, and once they've done that they can't possibly fall in love with anyone else; they're broken. In Tooth and Claw, female dragons start out gold, once they fixate on somebody they become pink, they become pinker through marriage, and an old dowager dragon will be red. But if you are pale pink and you are not engaged, this is a terrible scandal! You are ruined.

“The other thing in Victorian novels is the way that everybody's so incredibly, horribly mercenary: they're all obsessed with legacies and that kind of thing. In Tooth and Claw they eat their dead. There's a scene near the beginning where this guy has died, and the family is quarreling over who gets to eat which bit. It's really gruesome but kind of funny, and they are just like Victorian people.”

*

“I wrote my latest novel Lifelode in two parts, and it then got reworked a lot more than most of my books. It started off with my reading the Paston Letters. The Pastons were a medieval family who kept all their letters, and we have like 400 years of this family's letters. Medieval people sued each other all the time -- they were always suing each other! I was reading that and thinking, 'Boy, this is different from the way you see the medieval period done in fantasy! Why has nobody ever done this in a fantasy novel?'

“Simultaneously, I had a response to Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu Earthsea books, where I feel like she's saying with her mouth, 'Women's stuff is important' but saying with her actions, 'They're really boring.' I think she fixed this problem in the Western Shore books, and I love those books, but Earthsea revisioned annoyed me a lot because it was contradicting itself.

“I wanted to do something that included magic, but was domestic. So you don't have, 'Oh, there's a wizard and wizards are men, but women are so important because they wash the dishes.' There's a thing in the book where you can pull a hair off your head and twist it in a particular shape, put it on the window sill, and it collects all the dust in the room (every so often, you have to change it). It's domestic magic.”

Comments are welcome...

Charles Coleman Finlay: The Crucible

Charles Coleman Finlay grew up in Marysville Ohio, and has lived in central Ohio for most of his life. His first published story was "Footnotes" in F&SF in 2001.

Finlay's fascination with history informs much of his writing. Novella "The Political Officer" (2002) was a finalist for the Nebula and Hugo awards, as was follow-up "The Political Prisoner" (2008), which was also a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Some of his short fiction was collected in Wild Things (2005).

Finlay's first novel The Prodigal Troll (2005) was both a thought-provoking fantasy and an homage to classic adventure fiction, set in the world of his stories "A Democracy of Trolls" (2002), "Love and the Wayward Troll" (2005), "The Nursemaid's Suitor" (2005), and "Abandon the Ruins" (2006). His Traitor to the Crown trilogy, a secret history of the Revolutionary War with magic, appeared under the byline C.C. Finlay: The Patriot Witch (2009), A Spell for the Revolution (2009), and The Demon Redcoat (2009). In 2003, Finlay was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Finlay is active as a teacher and mentor in the field, serving as administrator of the Online Writing Workshop from 2000-2007, and teaching at Clarion and the Clarion Young Authors Workshop, the Alpha Writers Workshop, and numerous convention workshops. He also founded the Blue Heaven professional novel writing workshop and served on the juries for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.


Excerpts from the interview:


“If there's one thing you need to know about me, it's my background. I'm trailer trash. I grew up in a trailer park next to the city dump and the sewage treatment plant. No man in my family had ever gone higher in school than the eighth grade, and no one had ever gone to college. But there were readers in my family. My mom had been a reader, although when I was young she was working two jobs most of the time. That's because my father was an abusive alcoholic, so she packed up me and my sister and moved from New York back to Ohio to start over again. The trailers we lived in always had stacks of books and she always made sure that I had things to read. Reading was my escape -- from the trailer park, from all the fights I had with other kids, from the smell of trash and sewage.

“But more than that, the characters in books became my role models. So there I was, stuck in this trailer in Ohio reading Tarzan -- that's not like being in the arms of a gorilla in Africa, I'm not saying that. But it put things in perspective. That was my attraction to the literature of the fantastic from a very early age, the scale and scope of it. I'd think, if Frodo can carry the Ring to Mount Doom, then I can get through my problems. In fantasy and science fiction, I saw characters who were faced with horrible, unfair situations and somehow they always managed to rise above them. That was very appealing to me.”

*

“I got lucky. Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF bought seven stories from me in about a year. They were all over the place -- something experimental, comic science fiction, space opera, Leiberesque sword-and-sorcery, high fantasy, alternate history. As I wanted to develop my career and move into novels, that posed challenges because I didn't have an identity as a writer. When Bill Schafer at Subterranean came to me with the idea of collecting all my sword and sorcery stories, I didn't have enough of them and I wasn't in a space where I could write 60,000 words more, so I said, 'Can we do a collection of all my different stories instead?'

“That's how Wild Things came about. That was a collection that had something for everyone to hate. I got a lot of reader reviews from people who were looking for just one kind of kick -- fantasy, hard SF, horror -- so they would love one story and then hate all the others. If I ever have another chance to do a collection, it will just be sword and sorcery, just science fiction, just horror. I won't jump all over the place, because that didn't work.”

*
“These days, I think the impulse toward short stories, and the short story market in speculative fiction, is profoundly anticommercial. It's reaching for an audience that's interested in other things. So that transition between what makes for a satisfying short story and what makes for a commercial novel is a hard one to bridge. There are writers who are doing it -- people like Tim and Tobias, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear -- but it's hard.

“The Traitor to the Crown trilogy -- The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat -- is a secret history of the American Revolution in which witches and magic play the central role. The Revolutionary era is a great period of history, one where there are so many larger-than-life figures to work with and really interesting things happening. The belief in the supernatural is already present, and some people -- like the Count and Countess Cagliostro -- were actually trying to influence events through the use of the supernatural. And there are so many events that are unexplained that it's the perfect setting to explore in fiction.”

Comments are welcome...

John Crowley: End of An Age

John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, where his father, a doctor and captain in the Army Air Corps, was stationed. The family settled in Indiana and Crowley attended Indiana University, earning a degree in English.

Crowley writes SF, fantasy, and mainstream literary work, often blurring genre distinctions. His first three novels were (mostly) SF: The Deep (1975), Beasts (1976), and Engine Summer (1979). He turned to literary fantasy with Little, Big (1981), winner of a World Fantasy Award and perhaps his best known work, called "a neglected masterpiece" by critic Harold Bloom.

He embarked on his hugely ambitious Ægypt series with Ægypt (1987), followed by Love & Sleep (1994), Daemonomania (2000), and Endless Things (2007).

Other novels include mainstream work The Translator (2002) and ambitious historical Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005), which includes a fictional novel by the poet. His latest novel, Four Freedoms (2008), is also historical, set in an American aircraft factory during World War II.

Crowley's short fiction is also celebrated, including "Novelty" (1983), "Snow" (1985), World Fantasy Award winner "Great Work of Time" (1989), and Locus Award winner "Gone" (1996). His short work has been collected in the World Fantasy Award-winner Novelty (1989), plus Antiquities (1993) and Novelties & Souvenirs (2004). Some of his non-fiction was gathered as In Other Words (2007). His work was the subject of critical study Snake's-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley, edited by Alice K. Turner & Michael Andre-Driussi (2003).

He also writes scripts for educational films and documentaries, and co-founded Straight Ahead Pictures with his wife in 1989 to produce film, video, radio, and online media.

Crowley's numerous awards include an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1992) and a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award (2006).


Excerpts from the interview:


“It's very hard living at the end of the Age of Print. It poses problems for all of us. It gets more and more discouraging, in some ways. Are we going to be saved by the ten thousand people all over the world who want and need our particular kind of book? Or do we have to forget about all that, write it on stones, and leave it lying around on the beach? Try to sell a book: it's not easy today. It seems like the cost of printing books has gone down, so this should be a golden age of storytelling and a golden age of book production, yet I feel like I'm not going to be able to make a living doing this.

“As one gets older, fewer things change for us -- or things change more slowly, if we're lucky. When we last talked in 2001 I had finished the fourth volume of the Ægypt books (though it took a long time to get to press). I thought that was the last, but now I hope some foundation or somebody will help me to write the fifth volume, which will consist of a learned commentary on the entire four-volume series. I want to do it myself, because no fan, no critic is going to get it right. Though it's sort of like explaining a joke, I would like to explain all the cool little things that are hard for readers to get or notice.

“I've never really had an editor. I've never had somebody say, 'John, you've just gone too far. This is stupid! Take this part out, write another page explaining this, and that will allow you to cut the next 30 pages.' Nobody has ever done that with any of my books. I wish they would. Very few editors do that anymore. In my experience, editors acquire books but they don't actually alter them. Though in the case of Lord Byron's Novel, I did use suggestions from both my editor Jennifer Brehl and my agent Ralph Vicinanza, for ways of giving background on Byron and having Ada find the manuscript -- neither of those are my original conception, and I was very happy with those. So I guess that counts as an editorial contribution. I'm always open to suggestions. I'm not like Nabokov, where every editorial suggestion would be marked by an angry 'STET!' in the margin.”

*

“I attempted to give Four Freedoms a documentary feel, but a lot of it's made up -- more than it might seem. All historical novels insert a guy who's made up into interaction with people who really did exist. The real Ludwig Wittgenstein studied engineering, flew kites, and designed a patented propeller, all that’s true -- but he didn't sell his patent to my entrepreneur character Henry Van Damme, because my character’s made up! (But the many suicides in the early history of flight recounted in the book are true.)

“All that stuff about early flight doesn't have to be in the book, but I just loved it. I had decided that the airplane pioneers in my book would be brothers, and then I discovered how many real pairs of brothers were involved in the early history of flight: the Wright Brothers, the Montgolfier Brothers, all these pairs of brothers! What is that about? What it seems to be is one brother has an idea and the courage to actually fly these crazy, suicidal machines, and you need the other one to do the calculations and the math and say, 'No, no, no, not yet!'

“At the end, a way of understanding the novel is presented to the smart reader, the careful reader, that I hope will resonate back through the whole book and cause it to be seen as a real American fantasy. The only places in my America that are named are Ponca City, Oklahoma, and San Francisco. You may have felt Chicago, or San Diego, but Chicago and San Diego aren't named. And yes, I did that on purpose. I guess I was trying to make it all-American, without being tied down to any single part of America.”

*
“To actually articulate a way of being in a literary world without boundaries between reality and fantasy – it can’t just be a bunch of craziness and surreal carrying on, like some writers in the '70s were doing. What is done in the writing has to be understood by the standard structures of what counts as a moving and live piece of fiction. It has to do the work of fiction no matter what may be going on, and not, 'Well, we're going to throw away the rules.' Every 25 or 30 years, people attempt to do that, throw away the rules, and it keeps on not working. Gertrude Stein did it, Finnegans Wake does it, and they keep on having no progeny. Fantasy fiction at bottom, or at its best, is about making true fictions by the rules, in worlds you make up out of whole cloth, or out of your heart.”

Comments are welcome...