The Tech Side #1: A Broad-Spectrum Approach To Sci-fi Storytelling

ChristinaEngela

5 years ago

In this series of articles – The Tech Side – I’ll be talking about various bits of different tech, what gave me the ideas for them, and a little about what I did with them in various stories.

This time, I’ll be giving a brief overview of my relationship with technology, how it influenced my writing, and what to expect in future!

Once upon a time, after a high school English period, nearly 30 years ago, one of my favorite teachers said something about my writing that stuck with me to the present: She remarked that I used sci-fi terminology and descriptive terms with flair and apparent ease!

Having been my English teacher for only a few short months, that lady had only read my writing assignments, essays and compositions I’d handed in for marks one term, which – in the context of length, complexity or significance – wasn’t very much. In fact, due to scheduling clashes between various subjects resulting from subject choices, I and a number of other students found ourselves shifted to a different English class, and that was the end of that. Nevertheless, over the short time I was her student, she’d done her best to encourage me to write more and to develop my own style – by giving me room to grow and experiment, and by means of pointers and encouraging remarks such as this one. I blushed.

“Well Miss,” I admitted, “I guess you could say I’ve always enjoyed reading and watching sci-fi shows, and I’ve always had my own ideas on how things should be done!”

I have to admit, looking back, that sentence pretty much defines not only my own writing, style and subject matter – but my entire life. I love history and research, so I’ve also researched a lot about “tech stuff” and although I’m not a rocket-scientist or an autistic savant by any stretch of the imagination, I have a broad sense of how some things might work in a future setting – and of how they would affect people in various circumstances.

As much as a lot of sci-fi seems to be built around future tech and seems to become trapped in orbit around that tech, that’s not what I wanted my stories to be like. I wanted to tell stories about ordinary people living in a different time, whose lives are different due to the tech they have in their time – not stories about tech, where the characters are just props to demonstrate how it would work!

I think the motive of the writer is what it’s all about in that respect – and for me, the key to telling believable, relatable sci-fi stories is to not give too much tech information to the reader, where the characters fade into the background and the story becomes all about the tech and the science behind it. Some of the earlier sci-fi writers (often described as sci-fi visionaries) used to do that sort of thing – pages and pages would be taken up in describing how each piece of tech worked, what its positives and negatives were, and lengthy explanations of their effects on society, or why (in the case of nuclear war for example) it was a bad, bad idea that would probably lead to mass extinction of the species, if not all species!

That said, when I write about things like teleportation, faster than light propulsion or energy weapons, it’s a good deal easier these days because you don’t have to explain how it works in fine detail, right from the beginning as much as in previous decades, because most sci-fi readers – and even the so-called “man in the street”, are already familiar with these ideas and concepts.

The aggregation of sci-fi concepts and features into popular culture has generally become commonplace already. For example, AI is not only possible but feasible – and has existed in use for some time already, enough so that governments are beginning to recognize a need to regulate it. Even more remarkable, there is already a growing movement of hysterical opposition (1, 2, 3) to its use. Robots have already been available for quite a while, ranging from mobile industrial units to domestic assistants – from the very expensive to the not so much. Many people today would feel lost without Alexa to remind them to “buy milk tomorrow at 6pm” or turn the heat up just 5 degrees. You see, the “smart home” we read about in the 1950’s is now not only possible, but quite affordable to many people, and probably fairly commonplace in the first world, which already has its first “robot citizen” advocating for the understanding of AI.

The world of medicine has also made tremendous leaps forward in the last 30 years since I finished high school. For example, the fields of robotics, prosthetics and genetics have delivered usable artificial limbs, helped the paralyzed to walk again, and made deafness (1, 2, 3) and blindness (1, 2, 3) far less incurable than before.

Drone tech has just exploded during the last decade, and has revolutionized everything from home delivery services to fireworks and light-show displays – and even warfare. High-energy 60kw laser cannons have been tested and now fitted to some US warships (1, 2, 3, 4). The ion thruster – a longtime feature of some sci-fi in different forms – has also entered this field and is likely to replace the deadly whirling blades of contemporary conventional drones soon. An offshoot of this promises the first FAA approved personal flying car within the next year, while all motor manufacturers are gearing up to abandon ICE’s for EV’s by 2030-35. Also, there’s a growing number of self-driving vehicles with varying degrees of independence already on the road. Meanwhile, SpaceX is planning to colonize Mars and NASA is planning a return to the Moon.

As if that’s not enough, on the quantum side of things, scientists have already successfully experimented (on the atomic scale) with sci-fi elements such as teleportation and – believe it or not – time travel, proving these hypothetical concepts actually viable to some degree! Unfortunately, these boons of science don’t come cheap and while many are still not accessible to everyone – what all this graphically demonstrates, is the truth: the “future” is here, and has been already for quite some time.

Suddenly, if I write about a guy standing on a street corner in downtown Chicago chatting on his mobile phone to his boss who’s at a business conference in Proxima Centauri, it seems just a little less unbelievable – even more ordinary, doesn’t it?

Even so, the one thing that remains constant across time periods, is people. Technology my advance, society may decay, civilization may even fall – but people will always remain the same. That’s why I write sci-fi the way I do – the people take center-stage, the backdrop and the props are sci-fi.

While it may be many, many years before some of these items show up in our daily lives, we now know they are factually and realistically possible. It’s a little shocking to think that things like microwave ovens, desktop PC’s – laptops and smartphones – and even the humble brick-sized mobile phone from the early 1990’s were purely science fiction and generally regarded as “pipe dreams” only as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, isn’t it?

And that brings me to how the rapid advancement of tech affected my writing in the early days. For example, I’d started writing my first novel “Blachart” in about 1986 when I started high school – when things like mobile phones were pure fantasy, to say nothing of ‘smart phones’!

Back then, I literally wrote my stories by hand, and then, finally, the first draft was typed on a Sinclair QL back in 1989 (most people today probably won’t even know what that is) with a horrible green CRT monitor that made my eyes hurt (and the radiation from it actually turned the dust that gathered on it, green too)! But that didn’t last – the QL died on me and I couldn’t afford any kind of replacement for a long time. Nevertheless, it dawned on me that as a sci-fi author, I simply had to include wonderful new innovations in my stories too – or I would risk basically writing 1960’s sci-fi in the 21st century! So I did. With a pen and paper. Oh, the suffering!

Back in 1989, when I first wrote the early drafts of “Galaxii” and “Demonspawn“, the crew of the starship Mordrake boarded the alien derelict vessel carrying bioscanners – devices around the size of a large smartphone today – that would give the user full readouts of the environment they were in – temperature, barometric pressure, air chemical content analysis, EM, radiation and light-spectrum content etc. They would also be useful in detecting life signs across a broad band of known species. For those who might be thinking “gee, that sounds awfully like a tricorder from Star Trek“, you’re actually helping me prove my earlier point – it’s all been done before, right?

One day in 2003, I started to revise my earlier work on a PC using Word. Not only did this result in complete and total rewrites of any existing work, but it also revealed to me how out of date much of it had been. With a shock I realized that my characters were essentially technophobes – which was a curious state of affairs in a sci-fi setting! And so I had to update and change everything but the storyline! It was all very frustrating, and time consuming – but at least it was much faster using a PC! Additionally, I could print my stories on A4 paper from a laser printer – and I could even email them (via a dial-up connection in those days) almost instantly to a publisher on the other side of the planet – and seemingly equally quickly, they could send me a preformatted rejection letter! Isn’t tech marvelous? These days it’s so easy and quick that we actually take it for granted!

In the meantime, while I strove to make my writing more contemporary and relevant, the world around me slowly began to take on a startlingly less idyllic slant!

At some point, I began to realize I live in a weird world where things like a cure for cancer has taken a back-seat to something so soulless and shallow as profiting from the drawn-out treatment of it, a process in which the only known effective treatment for it was tagged a “gateway drug” for narcotics because it would knock the legs out from under the pharmaceutical companies and the cancer industry (that’s right, I said industry). Politicians with zero background in science casually dismiss green energy alternatives as “unviable” because adopting them would put the billionaires in the fossil-fuels industry out of business (even though that is dying anyway).

As a child, I’d watched as meaningful advancement on the frontier of space exploration took a back seat since the end of the Cold War, when the US seemed to think they’d run out of communist competitors to impress. (Incidentally, China – a country the USA habitually looks down on – has landed a series of small rovers on the Moon since 2007 and is talking about a manned mission to the far side of Luna within the next decade). Since the first iteration of this article, India – a 3rd world country – has joined them as “lunar explorers”. Artemis, the NASA initiative, is still only spooling up.

Down here on Earth however, things aren’t looking too good right now – and increasingly so each year – and I’m not just talking about the climate or environment. The world seems to have gone completely insane. Conspiracy theorists and science denialists with the IQ of a potato are shouting down actual scientists, and it’s commonplace to now encounter Flat Earthers and Moon-Landing Denialists in every sphere of society from the very lowest, to the most high. Oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia and religious extremism and hate crimes are ubiquitous, even in supposed bastions of democracy and human rights like the USA and UK and the EU.

I’ve long believed that war is the most favorite human pastime, and in the past two years, I’ve watched the politics and maneuvering around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, followed by last month’s eruption of a blatant Israeli genocide and war crimes festival in Gaza. Countries I would never have thought could side with pure, unadulterated and unmasked evil have proudly drenched their hands in innocent blood while the entire world appears to be drawing lines in the sand around Palestine. People everywhere are waving flags of other countries and exuding hatred for those carrying different flags. In spite of having unprecedented access to more knowledge at our fingertips than our ancestors, we live in a time of chaos, barbarism, violence and bizarre lapses in logic, reason and humanity that surpasses anything we’ve seen before.

I think, at this point, the only thing that still needs to happen, is for China to invade Taiwan, and the USA’s military-industrial complex will have the Third World War it’s been having wet dreams about for years. Imagine the profits it will make from the sales of all those bombs, bullets and bandages! But it doesn’t end there – the environment is also turning toxic. Every time I see something negative about our environment in the media – or experience days that are far hotter or colder than what was previously normal, I’m reminded about all those old encyclopedias and Usborne books about the future I read as a child – and I’m sorry to say, that the world today is starting to look a lot like the dystopian nightmares described in a lot of them.

The air, land and sea are being poisoned, global weather patterns are changing, water levels are rising – while governments (and many people) do bugger-all to address these issues. They seem to be waiting for some imaginary sky fairy to intervene and save them – and I could go on at length about that! Suffice to say, the world is in serious trouble – and a lot of people are ignoring it not just because they actually know better, it’s generally because of who’s giving the warnings (what do a bunch of geeks, atheists and teenage girls – know, right?) and because they’re running from their own fears that, if they stop to believe the warnings they’ll be overcome by the same sense of dread and hopelessness already felt by the rest of us with IQ’s higher than our shoe size, who have been paying attention.

It is in the midst of all this insanity that I continue to write my stories – while fewer and fewer people appear to actually buy and read books… in any format, not just paperbacks, or eBooks, or audiobooks. The market I aspire to has become flooded – its decks awash with hundreds of thousands if not millions of my fellow authors, indies and traditional alike, all competing for their own little space in a limited market with shrinking capacity. This too has become exacerbated by the advent of “AI books” – fake disingenuous material already flooding the market, and even being allowed on Amazon – which is now the monopolized king of book sellers… As if an AI has anything to say that is worth listening to.

Nevertheless, I persevere.

I continue to write fantasy adventures with one foot set in reality, with a hopeful outcome. I strive to tell worthwhile stories while also endeavoring to entertain, and even to provoke thought, emotion and to encourage curiosity and wonder.

Right through the Galaxii Series, and Quantum, and even Panic! Horror In Space, my characters visit and refer to extrasolar colonies – that is, colonized worlds in other solar systems – and they tend to speak of them like we do about having relatives in Alaska or Australia. They’re far removed from us geographically, but we can visit each other or speak to each other in video calls without too much fuss. Perhaps in a century’s time, people will speak about their cousins living on Mars in the same way? Maybe someone chilling in their lounge in Earth’s first extra-solar space colony will find a copy of one of my stories online and think “Wow… she wasn’t too far wrong about that… and that sure was a funny, entertaining, thought-provoking story…”

Well, I can dream, right?

While you’re unlikely to encounter any new tech in my stories that you’ve never seen before, you’re likely to trip over yourself realizing that I’ve done something different with it. For example, most starships in my stories come equipped with a teleportation device called a ‘transmatter’ – because it transmits matter – and yes, it is used in they usual, expected, almost conventional manner, to travel between ships, or from ships to planets and vice versa. However, in several of my stories, a couple of enterprising characters also happen to use their transmatter as a weapon. [read “Loderunner” and “Secret Weapons of the Resistance: Bovine Torpedoes” to find out how].

Although I’ve already written about it in an article (but not in a technological sense) the Akx from “Demonspawn” is both a villain and an interesting example of tech in context of this series of articles. Yes, that’s all very interesting, but in sci-fi isn’t tech all just plot devices? Is it still sci-fi if it only serves to discuss the function of a piece of tech – or is it just a dissertation dressed up with a veneer of fiction? That’s a question we need to explore in context of these articles!

From my perspective, the reader is more interested in the story – what the characters are doing, their interactions, and what happens to them, and how they get out of a jam – than in how exactly a handheld bioscanner works, or a blaster or the principles of a warp engine, and if you’ve written a couple of papers or a dissertation or two on the subject, or if you’ve drawn an exact circuit-diagram on how to build the thing if the reader could just get the right parts for it! At least, I think my readers are.

I love sci-fi, and the main reason for that is – in a terrifying world filled with a million reasons to feel hopeless, sci-fi stories and the marvel-machines and technologies dreamed up by their creators – give me hope. I hope to do the same for my readers.

As a storyteller, I know I have to make this stuff believable without getting wrapped up in explaining for three pages how a reflex furnace or transmatter works – the typical modern reader would get bored and lose interest in the story! This is entertainment – not a technical manual! The story needs to flow, so as a writer I cut the cackle and work around the lengthy explanations and treat the tech as someone might write about a character using a mobile phone or a microwave oven would today. Granted, it’s not quite that simple, but it operates somewhere between the two extremes, and that seems to work.

Now that the introduction is out of the way, in the next article we’ll be taking a look at a piece of Galaxii tech without all the “backgroundian” chatter!

Further reading: