Thread: Technological Advances

Just had a simple question and was wondering if you could help me. I was going to have my story take place around 2029 so that the technology wouldn't be to advanced. But I really wanted it to take place around 2084 so that many years have passed (story wise)... Do you think it matters? Or should technology be somewhat realistic?

I want there to be a lot of pollution, destruction, sickness, disease (more so than now), and very little technological advances but by 2084, I'm sure the technology will have improved. Solar power perhaps, less pollution, etc.

That might depend on where you set the story. Some third world countries might just be approaching our current technological level by then. Otherwise you'd likely be forced to extrapolate a lot of tech in order to operate in that later timeframe.
There are alternatives-you could use the post WWIII or IV sort of setting, for example, or posit political changes that keep technology from advancing. The energy question could have been answered by going nuclear and you could have a 3 Mile Island or Chernobyl-type incident, or natural disasters.
Even by 2029 there'll likely be a lot of changes. You could go with the cyberpunkish model for that, or the dystopian model that predated the cyberpunks. Sounds interesting.

Thanks for the advice moderan.

You're welcome. There are quite a few decent novels dealing with that subject matter. I'd recommend John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up for an example of ecological nightmare in the reasonably near future. A book with that type of setting, where the disaster in unspecified, is Samuel Delany's Dhalgren.
It's a simple question but the answers, as you see, can be very complex.

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll definitely check to see if they have those at my library.

Here are the wiki articles if you can't find them:
the sheep
dhalgren

Thanks.

Do you know what year when The Sheep Look Up takes place?

Originally Posted by Ana Kata

I bet google does.

You popped your head in here just to say that? Very informative.

I've actually been to a few sites including Amazon and Wiki and it doesn't give a direct date when the book takes place.

Brunner never actually says what year it is. From internal detail it's clear that it's near-future. The book was written in '72, which would make the possible future right about now. And in a lot of ways, he's spot-on. His earlier novel Stand on Zanzibar and the later works the Shockwave Rider and the Jagged Orbit are similarly dystopian though they concentrate on extrapolating other social details. They're all directly pre-cyberpunk. Gibson mined them for the backgrounds to his early stories and novels. From Locus:"The 21st century is weird, man! I got there by the slow time machine, living my way to it. In a world like this, what constitutes the mundane? None of this is very mundane anymore, because it's all touched by this kind of multiplex weirdness. We're here, and it's weirder than anything I've ever read in science fiction, except Brunner's The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. That's the closest thing to a prediction of where we are that I can think of. Brunner found a way to have all the overlapping science fiction scenarios of a world like the world where we live in one book. (He borrowed the technique from Dos Passos, but that's good.) But if you had gone to a publisher in 1981 and pitched a science fiction novel where there's this disease called AIDS and there's global warming and this list of 20 other contemporary things, they would have called security!”

Thanks for the info Moderan.

I'm not an expert by any means, but on the occasions I've dabbled with it, I've left out the future date. Also, does the future have to be that bleak? Does it have to be bleak at all?


Robots should help us, medical advances should eradicate disease, global warming should be under control, wars should be eliminated with global education, the LHC experiment might have told us the truth at last.


We could be spending our holidays on Mars, swallowing pills to make us live for however long we want to, and other pills to make us perpetually happy, and interesting books will be read to us from our iPods.


And surely, in the future, we will have found the answer to love, ensuring that we never fail in our partner search.


Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to write of thunder and destruction after all?

The French have a saying, plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose - the more things change, the more things stay the same (no, I know that's not a literal translation, francophiles).

As an example, China will be the world's largest economy, with America trailing third behind Europe, and, if growth in the sub-continent cam be better exploited, maybe even fourth behind India. America will probably adopt the position that Britain occupies now - a post-imperial nation in decline, trading on past glories.

Technology may change, but people don't. In 2084 people will still be starving, governments will still be killing people, big nations will bully small ones.

Originally Posted by HarryG

I'm not an expert by any means, but on the occasions I've dabbled with it, I've left out the future date. Also, does the future have to be that bleak? Does it have to be bleak at all?

Not necessarily but for the type of story I'm going for, it needs to be bleak.

Originally Posted by HarryG

Robots should help us, medical advances should eradicate disease, global warming should be under control, wars should be eliminated with global education, the LHC experiment might have told us the truth at last.

Not without a heavy sum of money I would think. Eradicating a disease altogether would shut down billion dollar corporations, drug companies etc. All they care about is profit and shareholder value. You can't make money off of healthy people. They want people sick and taking pills for the rest of their lives. So unless that is dealt with, I can't really see a future where disease is no more.

Originally Posted by Mike C

Technology may change, but people don't. In 2084 people will still be starving, governments will still be killing people, big nations will bully small ones.

True.

Thanks for the advice and comments.

Originally Posted by HarryG

We could be spending our holidays on Mars, swallowing pills to make us live for however long we want to, and other pills to make us perpetually happy, and interesting books will be read to us from our iPods.

That's become a sf cliche, which doesn't make it any less possible. Certainly the pharmaceutical lobby would like it that way.

Originally Posted by S1E9A8N5

Not without a heavy sum of money I would think. Eradicating a disease altogether would shut down billion dollar corporations, drug companies etc. All they care about is profit and shareholder value. You can't make money off of healthy people. They want people sick and taking pills for the rest of their lives. So unless that is dealt with, I can't really see a future where disease is no more.

Not without a gigantic paradigm shift (see the above). Given the plethora of prescription drug commercials that are shoved down our throats, that shift doesn't appear to be on the horizon. The insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies have this country in a stranglehold. Physicians prescribe rather than treat in many cases, perpetuating that lock. Those are some of the subjects of my NaNo piece.
Perhaps with the possible Chinese-dominated future, Eastern medical practices will become predominate, or at least gain a larger degree of credibility. Something like The Man in The High Castle's setting, where the I Ching is used reflexively and acupuncture is more prevalent. Pills are more palatable than needles though, so that's problematical. Perhaps some sort of download in a cybernetic environment? Just some random thoughts.

I decided to revive this thread because I'm still struggling with this topic.

I understand that I can use a post WW3 setting or I can have political changes that keep technology from advancing etc. But I don't understand why these things affect/don't affect change for the setting I'm going for. Obviously things are bad in a post WW3 scenario but why do these events (WW3 or political changes etc.) keep technology from advancing? Do I have to get detailed about it or can I just write "this happened" and "this is the way it is now". I'd like to understand why these things affect/don't affect change. Does that make sense?

Is there a post apocalyptic book for dummies?