Is Technology Leaving Readers Behind?
It’s pretty much an accepted fact that ethics will always trail technology. It’s inevitable: you can’t ask questions of something that doesn’t yet exist; and, by and large, the people pushing the boundaries of the possible in science and technology aren’t necessarily the people who will look at the breakthrough and ask the questions. They only want to know if something can be done; it’s only later that someone else arrives on the scene and asks whether it should be done. And by then it’s far too late.
If you cannot imagine something, you can’t determine its benefits and problems. No one worried about the consequences of cloning until Dolly the Sheep was a reality.
Authors have some of the same problems. I think that by and large science-fiction authors do an excellent job of positing new technologies—and then showing their drawbacks. Prescient imaginations from Leonardo da Vinci (who said that one day humanity would travel to the moon in a spaceship launched from Florida) to George Orwell explored possible future achievements and—in the case of Orwell and Ray Bradbury, for example—how those achievements could change human culture.
As an author myself, I’ve never been able to do that. For one thing, I’m not smart enough to posit new worlds with new technologies. For another, I tend to look backward for wisdom, considering humanity in certain historical periods and applying its lessons to modern-day fictional characters.
But I do know the often-disappointing and sometimes humorous results of writing a novel that uses current technology… only to see the world subsequently overtake the story. I once, pre-Internet, wrote what I thought to be a particularly clever thriller with the unfortunate premise of information wanted by multiple entities being held on a small card—the card being cutting-edge for the time and therefore très cool. And then 1991 arrived and opened up the metaverse, and I couldn’t find a way to write the central fact of the card and its exciting transport out of the story. Another for the Dead Books file!
We encounter the problem as readers all the time. I’m often amused by a story that features pay telephones, cars without seatbelts, and the constant consumption of nicotine in public places. I enjoy references to letters written on typewriters, to navigation done with only a sextant, and to problems solved with slide rules. Of course, it’s not a tremendous stretch of the imagination for me to visualize any of that, as I remember those times. But I wonder what younger readers who never experienced now-disavowed practices and obsolete technologies make of them.
Of course, it’s not a new problem: the world marches on. And the best authors place every event or entity in a context that makes them understandable if not wholly understood. When Lord Peter Wimsey, living between the two world wars, picks up a soda syphon to mix cocktails, I get the picture (and apparently siphons are coming back into fashion anyway), even if I’m not strictly visualizing precisely what it is he’s doing with it. And I do rather like the image of him using a toasting-fork—presumably held over an open flame—to create an impromptu teatime meal at a friend’s house. Once in a great while I’ll interrupt my reading of a long-dead author to look up something referenced in the text, but that’s unusual. The authors whose works have endured generally manifest a skill level ensuring no one is discomfited in encountering an unknown object or technology in their stories.
And, hey, if in the year 2080 someone is appropriately confused by my description of a character pumping gas into their vehicle, then the reader can always look at up. After all, nothing is ever lost in the World Wide Web.
None of that, of course, answers the ethics dilemma. The implications of a technology developed in Year One probably won’t be analyzed, understood, and evaluated until Year Three, and in the meantime habits around usage will have taken hold, aided and abetted by the novels that are written between the two.
As writers, one of our obligations, I think, is to be the vehicle that enables readers to ask these questions in a safe fictional space. Raising the questions in fiction doesn’t make them any less real, or any less urgent, or any less difficult, but it serves the same function as fairytales and horror stories, the option of experiencing fears without also experiencing immediate and life-threatening danger. And, in addition, it helps readers see some of the less-shiny side of the Newest Thing. It may even stir them to action.
As political systems around the world fail, I come back to the responsibility inherent upon being a storyteller: if you can write the stories for a society, as the saying goes, then it doesn’t matter who writes the laws. The laws will change; the technologies will become obsolete; but if they’re still telling our stories around some post-apocalyptic firepit, then we’ve given a gift to the future.
I can’t think of anything more important.