You've probably seen it all over Facebook already, but in case you haven't, today is the date that Marty travels to in the second
Back to the Future movie. Yep, the future is now!
I see lots of articles pointing out how few of the technological advances depicted in the film actually came to pass. I don't find this strange at all. I've argued for a long time that writers tend to be overly optimistic in their timelines for when they believe advances will happen. Funnily enough from what I observe, the more inaccurate such sci-fi writing is, the more popular it tends to be. From Snow Crash to Blade Runner to Back to the Future and so many more, the writers depict near-future situations as if almost everything will massively transform, when we all know the reality is that only a few things change dramatically while most things change fairly little. Don't get me wrong, I love these stories, but it does bug me a bit just how far off they are.
So when I write my own science fiction I tend to give more realistic timelines for the technology that I wish to depict. I feel that the story of
The Immortality Game is what I consider to be near-future, but I still chose a date of 2138, because I wanted to be sure that we actually had a realistic time frame for the changes that I wanted to show.
By the way, this week (until October 26) I have
The Immortality Game on sale for .99 (from the normal $3.99 price). Please let your friends know!
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I guess Marty didn't go far enough ahead.
ReplyDeleteThere are massive changes, but they are subtle. No flying cars, but it only took a few years for the world to be connected online through social networks. The world depicted in Wall-E is slowly coming to pass.
I agree that there are some few areas of massive change, like the internet, but at the same time so much of everyday life goes on relatively unchanged.
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