RJS guest blogs in Boders SF blog
by Rob - July 6th, 2009.Filed under: Uncategorized.
I’m the guest blogger for July 2009 in Borders Books’s science-fiction blog “Babel Clash,” co-sponsored by i09. My first post — my opening salvo, if you will — is over there, and also posted below, but I’m turning off comments on this topic here; come on over to Borders.com and chime in there!
Time has a way of catching up with you. My novel FlashForward was first published in 1999, and was set in the then-distant year of 2009 — starting in April, to be precise.
Well, now the future is here: reality has caught up with what I had to say. Some things I got right (the new pope did take the name Benedict XVI!) and some things I got wrong. Was it gutsy, or foolhardy, to set a book so close to the present day?
What about my current novel, WWW: Wake? That one is set only three years from now — surely I’m courting disaster with such a near-future setting? (And other books, such as my Hugo Award-winning Hominids, were set in the year they were published — 2002, in that case.)
I’ve heard some other writers say it’s impossible to write near-future SF anymore — because science and technology (not to mention the political and social landscape) change so quickly, you’re bound to be proven wrong. Those writers seem to prefer the far-future.
But I find that most modern far-future SF doesn’t interest me. When you wave nanotech like a magic wand, when you invoke the technological singularity as an excuse for anything-goes, when it’s all just a simulation (or a dream), I find I just don’t care.
I think science fiction’s greatest strength is its ability to comment on the here-and-now, and, well, for that, there’s no time — or setting! — like the present.
Okay, that’s where I’m coming from on this. What do you all think? Would you rather read about A.D. 2010 or A.D. 2100 — or maybe A.D. 21,000?
Rob
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