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Columns

The Future and You February 2007

Written by Stephen Euin Cobb

Listen as Elizabeth Bear, Toni Weisskopf, Walter Jon Williams, Ginjer Buchanan and L.E. Modesitt describe many of the technological and social changes which will alter your life during the next few years.

The Future And You is an award-winning audio podcast about the future which may be downloaded and enjoyed, or even copied and shared, for free. Every episode contains many interviews which reveal a wide variety of ideas and opinion from a wide variety of people.

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The February 1, 2007 episode includes all of the following and more:

Elizabeth Bear shares her expectations on the future discovery of earthlike planets and her ongoing involvement with SETI-@-home. She also discusses religion, agnosticism vs. atheism, buying things on eBay, non-lethal military weapons, and her reluctance to use any future version of Microsoft Windows as the primary operating system for her eventually augmented brain.

Toni Weisskopf describes several of the trends going on within book publishing such as SF&F titles crossing over into mainstream and how the shrinking shelf life of books in stores hurts authors as well as customers.

L.E. Modesitt suggests there is a growing inflexibility in the world, and that cell phones are slowing the rate at which today's teens mature. He sees the media as promoting inflexibility most prominently in politics since they will not allow a politician to learn, grow and change his or her mind. Instead, the media will hold a politician to old statements and policy positions even if those statements or positions were made decades ago. He also suggests that the media promotes conflict, since it insists that all conflicts are between polar opposites. Disagreements which are seen as small or subtle or nuanced will not draw a TV audience or sell papers. He also describes how cell phones may be slowing maturity in students by preventing them from ever being "on their own" when facing life's problems. With cell phones, no one is ever on their own, so self-reliance becomes an option which is rarely chosen and never incorporated into the personality. Even young people's opinions seem to be formed by a committee of friends through a consensus of feelings, rather than by cold solitary logic. And when asked about eBooks, Mr. Modesitt described how Isaac Asimov formally analyzed what would make up the "The Perfect Book."

Ginjer Buchanan (Senior Executive Editor and Marketing Director of Ace and ROC books) names those Hard SF authors she feels have the most accurate or persuasive vision of the future. Her picks include Charles Stross (a former Linux programmer), Alastair Reynolds (astronomer), Allen Steele (journalist) and Jack McDevitt. One of these authors, she discovered herself from the slush pile twenty years ago. She also addresses the question of how well Hard SF is competing in the bookstores.

Walter Jon Williams says with assurance that "The war against Utopia has been won." He also asserts that the fight of the 21st century will be the war against fundamentalism. He suggests that Nanotechnology is "all over the place," and that biotechnology is likely to produce immortality within forty years. He expects the big publishers will eventually solve the problem of making money from eBooks, even if they have to use methods that appear heavy-handed. He expects wirelessly networked computers to becoming ubiquitous in most all of your household devices, even those that never before contained computers such as washers, driers, microwaves, as well as your clothes and your shoes. And that all these computers will talk to one another—about you. He also describes how consumer databases are already being used to not only market products to people but also to market political ideologies.

And as always we include another installment in our serialization of the Hard SF novel, Bones Burnt Black; and Bananaslug & Stoney do their bit to let the world at large know what's in the current issue of