I’m editing my first NaNovel right now. I’m thinking about how a restaurant would work in the future, what would actually change, and really, in the background…? I’m thinking not so much.
Tomatoes still have to be chopped, cheese shredded, dishes washed. Sure, machines exist to do these things, but machines cost money that maybe a restaurant owner wouldn’t have to invest. And on a frontier planet with lots of eager workers (which means cheap labor) and high import costs, why wouldn’t you just hire somebody to do all that stuff?
But the technology exists, some will argue. Why don’t they use it? You didn’t think about that!
This is one of the problems I run into, writing sci fi. I remember talking about this book in the NaNo forums way back when. I mentioned they were out in the middle of nowhere and unable to contact civilization, and someone attempted to call me on it.
Everyone has cell phones now, why wouldn’t they have them in the future?
Well, dear, because cell phones are not magical talkie-things; they need a network. If no one has been out in the wilderness building cell phone towers, there will come a point in the journey where cell phones no longer work.
Satellite phones? Do they have any satellites? It’s the future, you know.
Sure, they have a few satellites. But if a cell phone is enough to call everyone you know (who lives in the city) why would you just happen to have a satellite phone?
GPS? How can they be lost?
Knowing exactly where you are on a map is helpful, but anyone who’s ever used GPS knows that it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know. Also, no Google street view car in the untracked, unexplored wilderness. If a terrain feature can’t be seen from a satellite picture (due to, I don’t know, TREES?) it’s not yet known. So it’s knowing where you are on a blank map with “Here Be Monsters” scrawled on it. Not so incredibly helpful.
This idea that technology is both pervavise and infallible is not only silly, it’s dangerous. I liken it to the belief a lot of people seem to share that having a gun protects you from being shot. That’s not how it works, people. If it were, we would lose a lot less soldiers.
A gun is not a shield. Neither is a cell phone. And apparently some people have never suffered a low battery at an inopportune time. (Don’t get me started on people who never run out of bullets.)
Ahem.
I don’t know if it was the same person or someone else who critiqued my idea for a stretcher with a low-powered anti-gravity unit with “anti-gravity doesn’t exist, won’t ever exist.” I was delighted not long after to stumble across the theory that dark energy may be anti-gravity.
While I’m talking about naysayers, I’d also like to mention I had a know-it-all acquaintance who used to affirm with absolute certainty that it was not possible to travel faster than light. Things like hyperspace travel could not exist, because that would mean traveling faster than light and that was not possible. As if some omniscient traffic cop was out there to stop us.
Yeah, well, the speed of light isn’t as incontrovertible as maybe we thought.
Sure, I write soft SF. I still take my science seriously, man. 😀
Haha, some of these people calling you out obviously don’t think too hard about the Achilles heel of our own current high-tech world. “We put dudes on the moon years ago, why are there no space settlements?” Oh, no, we’ve been too busy spending money going to war to spend money on space exploration, and y’know, the public kinda thinks it’s a waste of time in general. “Wait, but we had supersonic commercial passenger flight years ago!” Oh, no, we just stopped doing that for some reason. Guess they got some bad press after exploding a whole bunch of people by mistake.
There is a LOT of stuff we just don’t do now even though we could, for human reasons. Heck, the interaction between humans and the tech they create is what actually makes sci-fi interesting to me. Technology we lose or that stops serving us properly is such a great trope – like Pern and all the stuff they forgot over the generations when they had to leave the continent they first settled on.
For the record, it wouldn’t surprise me AT ALL if cell phones became even less ubiquitous in the future. Because we’re all starting to realise that cell phone = someone being able to trace your movements, and protecting yourself from the government or other, unspecified listeners is going to become a big issue the more we use that kind of tech. Where I live, you can get poor reception without even having to go into the wilderness, because there’s such a big fuss over the aesthetic impact whenever someone says, “But we need to put up another tower to improve this.” Damn those people!
Oh, and we’re probably going to be using outdated technology for our Internet in Australia for decades to come. Because we *could* put in better conduits, but our government thinks the old stuff is just fine. Oh yeah, and their predecessors wanted to put in better conduits so they won’t do it just to spite them. If you just looked at it from a perspective of the best tech we could have at present, it wouldn’t make a damn bit of sense.
Yeah, really, I think us soft sci-fi writers have to take our science just as seriously as the hard writers…
I have a co-worker who doesn’t have a cell phone (and she works almost an hour from home). She is traveling to a different state for work and I’m loaning her one of my tablets (yes, I have more than one) so she stay in touch with her husband. For her, not having a cell phone is part an issue with not wanting one and not being able to afford one. Just because the technology exists, doesn’t mean it is accessible to everyone.
Google sent me in the wrong direction off the interstate. The navigation app on my phone kept loosing the GPS signal in Atlanta, GA (and yes I suck at figuring out where I am and ended up driving in circles). There are plenty of areas around here that cell phones just don’t work.
I have an IT degree and even I take a very Luddite route to so many of the things I do. I even do most of my programming with pen and paper before entering in the computer, saves me the worry about computer crashes at inopportune times. I actually write letters instead of emails to certain people. Even with the technology for self-checkouts, their are still cashiers. Technology might be available for everyone, but not everyone wants to use it.