What have I got wrong?
Sci-fi authors often extrapolate current events, inventions, and issues into the future, so they run the risk of getting it wrong. Usually, the farther they extrapolate, the safer the extrapolation, because who knows what things will look like thousands of years hence? Near-future extrapolations can easily be proven wrong later on in the life of a novel. I’m more than a sci-fi author, of course, but I’ve written enough speculative fiction that I’ve guessed a lot about what will occur in humanity’s future, near or far.
Some of my guesses are more obviously wrong than others and soon proven wrong. Hydrogen-powered cars in the early “Chen & Castilblanco” novels are an example. A more egregious error perhaps, because I saw the intense hatred for our first black president among the far right (who became today’s MAGA maniacs—their future fuehrer championing that “birther theory” for years), I thought there’d be at least one attempt to assassinate Obama (the first novel, The Midas Bomb). (If Obama’s roasting of Trump in that national press event had already occurred—the latter’s expression is enough to betray his thoughts because narcissistic sociopaths can’t take humorous criticism—I probably would have guessed that the assassin would be a Trump supporter, not a Russian terrorist as in the novel.) These errors (and others) were near-future extrapolations that are surprisingly more difficult because they’re usually more detailed and specific than the far-future ones. They also turned my whole “Future History” timeline into an alternate history of humanity after the fact!
That timeline is also interesting because it predicts a slower turn to fascism in the world than what’s occurring, an eroding fascism in the US and elsewhere that basically follows the Chinese model—i.e. an Earth controlled by autocratic multinational corporations, their CEOs forming a world order akin to an oligarchy that doesn’t require a Putin or Xi. I believe that will still occur a lot faster now (I’m more pessimistic about this with every day that passes), but it looks like this Chaos I’ve postulated might arrive a bit later than I thought. People will have to get tired of personality cults first, Narcissus le Grand’s among them.
Moving along that timeline, the excesses of AI we now worry about (Chat-whatever is still very primitive, computer code that’s more brute-force than elegant) are seen in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan (bridge novel between the “Inspector Steve Morgan” series and “Clones and Mutants”), and they naturally led me (I was already bored by HAL) into Full Medical (first book in the latter series) and the consequences of cloning. While AI might have more importance than I’ve projected, cloning has been simmering on the stove’s backburner and will probably soon rear its ugly head again. On the other side of the stove, you’ll find bubbling in the pot more atrocities and excesses created by radical religious fanatics like those that already exist because of these fanatics’ participation in the MAGA hordes; you won’t have to wait long for the consequences portrayed in Soldiers of God. Or maybe I just didn’t get the order right?
Of course, for me and many other sci-fi writers, these predictions about humanity’s future are just warnings that put flesh on the bones of a plot that is often an exciting adventure, mystery, or thriller. Readers are imaginative and smart enough to suspend belief and just enjoy the rides on these futuristic rollercoasters. I do that in my own reading, but in my writing I still feel bad sometimes when I got it wrong.
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The “Future History” mega-series of novels. This alternate-history timeline begins with The Midas Bomb and moves through six series of novels (“Chen & Castilblanco,” “Esther Brookstone,” “Steve Morgan,” “Clones & Mutants,” “Chaos Chronicles,” and A. B. Carolan’s YA sci-fi mysteries), three standalone novels (The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, Soldiers of God, and Rogue Planet), and ends with the Dr. Carlos stories (see Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape and elsewhere). The books can generally be found wherever quality ebooks are sold, and there are free PDF downloads containing stories that have settings on this timeline. (See the list on the “Free Stuff & Contests” web page.) A free PDF download covers most of the timeline. (I try to keep it up to date.) Enjoy!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
