One thing I try to do when writing a story is to pitch the technology right. The Fusion has things that the Republic, for example, wouldn’t have. Travel in the Fusion is always FTL (Faster Than Light) and always safe. It’s something the inhabitants take for granted. The Republic, on the other hand, has to rely on a network of ‘creases’ in another dimension they call ‘hyperspace’, and try to deal with the risks and anomalies that arise from using a medium they don’t fully understand.

The Fusion has such wonderful constructs as working dysons and semi-dysons, whereas the Republic can barely get by with limited terraforming and some anarchic asteroid mining communities living in low-grav. What are these societies’ timelines? On reflection, I think of the Republic as being about 400 years into the future, and the Fusion around 900 years (although the Fusion doesn’t even know Earth exists, so they might be very advanced yet contemporaneous). With such future societies, the issue then becomes making the technology advanced yet accessible.

People are fond of saying that if you plunked a person from Victorian England into the world of today, s/he wouldn’t recognise very much of it. They also quote Moore’s Law that posits, by corollary, a phenomenal increase, almost doubling, in the speed and sophistication of digital electronic devices every few years. While the law itself has proven to be true so far, I believe there’s a basic flaw in the surrounding thinking. Technology itself may have advanced, but the wholesale application of technology has not.

What I’m trying to say is, there is still no universal level of technological sophistication in the world. For every Silicon Valley, for example, there are dozens of unpowered villages, where the inhabitants live their lives in much the same way as their forebears did. Furthermore, all it takes to reduce an advanced edifice like the Valley to the level of more primitive villages is just one natural and capricious disaster. Think of any place around the world after a natural disaster, whether earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, or winter storms. Regardless of which country they took place in, the level of the subsequent technology is pretty well equivalent across locations (i.e. almost nil).

We are not as advanced as we like to think, and to say otherwise is, I feel, hubris on the part of those of us who have been exposed, and inured, to much of modern Western civilisation. On balance, if we average out every person’s experience of technology on Earth, I think we’d find that we are much less advanced than we’d hoped.

So what does this have to do with writing a sci-fi romance set four centuries in the future? Well, I try to use familiar terms so the reader can relate to what I’m trying to describe, and I do it for three reasons:

(1) I don’t want unfamiliar words to interfere with the plot,

(2) I want to establish some commonality between the present and my setting to evoke more reader empathy,

and, most importantly for the purposes of this blog,

(3) I really don’t think our applied technologies will advance at a cracking pace.

In a blog I wrote before the end of the year, I mentioned fleetingly that sf writers even 60 years ago were predicting such things as portable nuclear reactors, disposable paper clothing, meals in a pill, and fully functioning artificially intelligent robots to help us with our tedious chores. Also, by now, we were supposed to have mostly self-sufficient human bases on the moon and Mars, and beneath our oceans. It’s a measure of how much of a disconnect there is between technological advances and the human condition (sociology/psychology/politics) that we’re nowhere near there yet, despite our obvious technical and intellectual prowess. And it is that, I feel, that will keep the level of technology for humans rising only slowly and steadily across the world — and I don’t rule out some astounding stumbles — rather than in fantastical leaps and bounds.

In essence, our nature is our own worst enemy.