There is more and more of everything than ever before. Technology that let’s us see and experience the world in ways past the fantastic. A template for the future with ideas and wonders that fuel the imagination. The future, in my opinion of course, is digital. Or, at the very least, synthetic. Hear me out, Humanity is at the point now where we’re about to go trans-human. This period might last for the next 100 years but it’s coming (if not already here) and the ‘singularity’ predicted by Kurzweil is closer than we might like to believe.
Say what? That’s what I’m asking. What do you you want in your Sci-Fi?
Do you like the EXTREMELY gritty, with junked-spaceship colonies of fallen civilizations using old tech as religious icons, asteroid miners in filthy barracks with dangerous drugs and prostitutes, bizarre cults, forbidden religions, theft, blackmail, corporations more powerful than nations running the show on earth.
A future where the kind of tech that has the ability to get people from New York to Los Angeles in fifteen minutes or go half way around the world in half an hour. Technology that would turn the world into one big city along with all the good and bad that comes with that. To the ruling elite the bad outweighs the good for them though the good outweighs the bad for the rest of us.
Corporations with artificial intelligence bent on hacking virtual realities. A post-modernist attempt to revive the scientific romance of the nineteenth century, complete with post-modernist revisionism of our own history.
A future full of small, mundane and commoditized wonders and nightmares for the masses. Cheap stuff you could actually hope to buy and own. Not a perpetual amusement park anymore, rather a more sophisticated version consumerism and societal paranoia. A place you could actually envision yourself living without putting on your happy daydream glasses.
A living counterculture as the blueprint of Cyberpunk. Social critiques with contemporary relevance. A place where we have not lost any real sense of progression. Bombastic projects that do not take space travel and other grand engineering tropes for granted.
Have many of the tropes just become everyday life and therefore are no longer ‘awe-inspiring’ stuff by themselves? Can we perceive a curious reversal of that on the current techno-thrillers that do use existing technology or near-term extrapolations for entertaining us. What about the nano engineering revolution happening right now? What about synthetic lifeforms? What about quantum entangled photon and mass? The God particle? Let us thrive at the ambiguous points. Never getting stuck in a complacent groove. Gone are the days of the antics of a cyber-cowboy and his unreliable gang of digital merry men and renegades.
Could it be that the problem is that we have difficulty imagining a future. It’s not so much uncertainty at this point as a certainty that there’s nothing over the cusp of our imagination about the future. Do we really lack any idea of where to go from here.
Where’s my flying car? My rocket pack? Condo on the moon? My laser guns? My robo-servant who will ultimately turn against me when he/she/it becomes self aware.
It’s the usual “stuff just around the corner” that’s been around that corner for half a century. However, I like the idea of the most realistic future. Neither uptopia or distopia, just today, but with more shiny things.
-Dagobot