Bruce Sterling
Here's a good one: how the hell do you write a thriller novel in a world that has cellphones? I happen to be writing a thriller novel right now: in fact, I'm here researching it, not that you'd ever guess. I'm not really here to pontificate at you. I'm here to soak up your grand ideas for use in fiction, because I need them even worse than you do.It's amazing how little technical room is left for the customary cliches of a thriller novel, in this, our modern, digitized, networked society. No more car chases -- because I just use my cellphone and I call the cops in the next town. No more gunfights in deserted warehouses -- I just use my cellphone and I call the cops. No more trailing the spy to his sinister lair -- I just use my cellphone and I call up the cop's video monitors.
I was thinking about this after reading The Holy Sinner. Much of the romance in writing set in earlier times comes from the incredibly long journeys. One character goes on a pilgrimage. Others go on quests. Typically, journeys take weeks and months.
Who nowadays in the industrialized world would take longer than a weekend to get somewhere? My longest-ever trip was across the continent by train: three nights and four days. Ordinarily, it takes just a few hours. The folks who came to visit from Redmond yesterday were no doubt back home in time for dinner.
Even using an automobile and stopping to sleep, you can cross this continent in a week.
The only exception to the rapid-travel rule I can think of is Wolfgang's walking trip. She walked to Oregon, and it took an amount of time she could notice, and it was romantic or educational or at least experiential as something she noticed and lived and something which happened to her. But walking to Oregon in a novel doesn't make sense for most of the population. (Sure, not everybody has enough money to afford plane tickets. But most people who can't afford plane tickets also don't have months of spare time to walk to other states.)
The smaller world and the transportation-as-product industries do eradicate entire plot elements connected with travel. You don't have to find a good horse and a good map because there is a company whose business model is getting you from one airport to another for $200 with no intervention (but some identification) on your part.
Travel is more anonymous in older stories because things are more decentralized. When a person comes from another country, you don't know anything about that person. (You don't have state-issued ID, and you don't have credit bureaus, and you don't Google.) In The Holy Sinner, Gregorius shows up and says he's a knight, and other people ask him to prove he's a knight, so he proves he's a knight by riding a horse and by fighting. He doesn't have a "knight certificate", and he doesn't have any personal or professional connections. (OK, he turns out to be the illegitimate child of the ruler of that country, but nobody knows that for several chapters more...)
Today, it's difficult to get from one place to another without revealing (even possibly proving) your identity. Amitai Etzioni thinks this is good.
But the Sterling-relevant thing here is not whether it's good or bad but whether it affects writing literature, and I guess it does, because travel and communications just don't seem to work the way they used to, and that interfere with standard devices of mystery and suspense.
Bruce Sterling also said something particularly funny in that speech:
Ladies and gentlemen, yes, I know that THE MATRIX is a sci-fi movie. In my game, you get the good stuff where you find it, okay? I don't have to name-check sci-fi movies up here. I could have stolen you something nice and exciting from the many bright and accomplished people at Microsoft Research and Development. I pay attention to them, too. I know they're into stuff like a Sensory Pocket PC that that detects touch, tilt and motion; and Chinese text-to-speech software that probably detects Chinese piracy in real-time. So I tried that. I Googled it. I surfed over to the Microsoft Research "Archived Headlines", but since they are a modern computer company instead of a big-budget science fiction movie, this is what I got off their web page:
[Microsoft][SQL Server Driver] Invalid object name 'features'. Drivers error '80040e37'
