H.L. Mencken famously wrote: "Prediction is always difficult, especially about the future." That statement is at once clever, dismissive, and devastatingly true. It's an issue that J. Lee Porter and I face every day as we work on our current project--writing political fiction about the social and political implications and ramifications of emerging technology, specifically, the blockchain.
The most difficult thing about writing contemporary political novels is the rapid change of real events, Sitting in my comfy chair, it was easy to predict some countries would jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon the same way in, other times, they did on offshore banking. But Belarus? That surprised me.
If the changes were even linear, they'd be easier to anticipate, but when crypto is demonized one day and lauded the next (albeit a tamed, controlled, centralized version that is hardly cryptocurrency) it's hard to know what the next chain of events will be.
What we can do, and try to do, is examine the possibilities and dangers of implementing the new technology and the ways it might be implemented--for the how is a huge factor in the consequences a technology brings. Who controls (to the extent it is controlled) it is another issue. Sometimes, as with GMO food, the public is reassured, falsely, that it is controlled. The masses must be calmed, after all, even though there never was any way to keep genetically modified plants out of the food chain, and quite likely, no intention to do so. So, fiction dealing with that must address that particular deception.
We have a similar problem in writing about distributed ledger technology, except that it's backward--we are promised the advantages of the blockchain, yet "protected" from the horrors of privacy and no central authority. Happily, those empty, yet threatening promises are great fuel for fiction. Unhappily, they are a real and contentious issue.
When George Orwell wrote 1984, he envisioned a world that was quite different from the real version, and yet, using fiction as the vehicle, told a story that was startling true. He didn't get all the facts right, but he certainly got to the heart of things. He woke some people up and upset others.
We hope to do the same with the Bitpats series of books. That's why they are standalone novels in a contemporary universe of our own making.
And now, I'm supposed to be writing a scene in a Bangkok night market and need to get my head back into the sounds and smells of Thailand.
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