Eureka! Making Believable Future Technologies

Eureka!

Making Believable Future Technologies

By Bob Billing

©2001, Bob Billing  

Stories are about people - but the worlds those people inhabit will bring out the best or worst in them. And it's our job as authors to adjust our imagined worlds so that they will be plausible to the readers, while at the same time presenting the characters with some serious problems. I'll be talking about the sort of SF that has space travel as a major theme - because that's what I like - but a lot of what I have to say applies to other genres as well.

 

Imagined future technology has two uses to the author of SF. Firstly it allows speculation about how society might change in the future. If we had robots to do all the work for us, or interstellar travel to broaden our horizons - if we visited aliens with a completely different outlook on life or could travel back to the past and fix the nasty bits - what would our world be like? This can be taken further into the "idea as hero" story, in which the driving force of the story is the development of the idea itself, the human characters being upstaged by the central concept.

 

Secondly it allows us to tunnel past the reader's preconceptions. If we write a story set on an ocean liner  or an airliner we are faced with the reader having used real ships and airliners. And the reader will bring a great deal of emotional baggage on board which will get in the way of what we are trying to do. But if instead we move to a spacecraft, then we can be almost completely sure that the reader has never travelled in one. Now we are in control, everything the reader knows about the environment must come from what we have said. And we can use this as a tool to get closer to the eternal truths about the human soul.

 

To do this we have to make up some future technology - and we have to do it in such a way that the reader will say, "Yes, that's how it would have to be." In my opinion doing this depends on two things: point of contact and consistency.

 

The point of contact is the place in the reader's mind where the imagined thing sits, the handle that the reader can grab hold of. It allows the reader to put something new into a familiar category. For example: spaceships are a bit like aeroplanes, blasters have the function of handguns, interstellar communicators mirror mobile phones. But at the same time everything is sufficiently different to remind the reader that we are a long way from home: the spaceship has an airlock rather than a boarding door, the communicator has a lot more buttons than a cellphone - or none at all. Consistency is slightly more subtle, but in some ways easier to achieve. Even if the reader knows little of the laws of physics, or screams and stands on a chair when equations are mentioned, they still live in the real world. Readers know that horses need hay and carrots, big engines need diesel, aircraft need kerosine and steam trains need coal. So they aren't going to take too easily to a machine that runs on nothing at all. Say "conservation of energy" and they'll look blank, even though that's the right name for the physical principle behind the idea "it's got to run on something."

 

It's possible to spend all your life studying dozens of subjects - and still be caught out by this sort of thing. But the more effort an author puts into consistency, the more believable the future technology will be. There's no real alternative to doing some research here - even school textbooks will help. Useful topics include:

 

 

 

Conservation of mass and energy.

Conservation of momentum.

Hydrostatics - the relationships between weight, depth and pressure.

The properties of common materials such as wood, glass, metals and plastics.

The forces acting in simple structures.

 

 

 

Most of these ideas have been around for a long time. New discoveries have slightly modified them - but in the main they haven't changed. It's probably quite safe to say that they will go being useful well into the far distant future.

 

A lot of these concepts can be summed up as "You can't get something for nothing." This is a vital part of any plausible imagined technology - it must need some inputs, it must be fed with something that your characters can run out of. When they run out they have a problem - and when your characters have a problem you have a story.

 

Creating the technology is only the first part of the exercise. You now need to give it a "look and feel." This means answering questions such as:

 

 

 

How much training does it take to use one of these effectively?

How long does it take to start up?

Can you leave it turned on while you are away?

Are mistakes by the operator common?

Can an untrained person get it to work at all?

 

 

 

Coupled to this is the problem of making life too easy for the characters. Let's say you issue the hero with a self-loading, self-repairing weapon. It contains a little computer that makes sure it can't miss, can't shoot the wrong person and won't work if the bad guys steal it. You'd get one or two short stories out of it and that's all. You've made life too easy for the hero; it's difficult to think of a situation he couldn't resolve by firing a few shots in the right general direction.

 

Several otherwise good timelines have died in their adolescence for this reason. Larry Niven once said that the introduction of the unreasonably strong materials had stopped his "Known Space" series. He couldn't think of any problems to set his characters that they couldn't instantly solve.

 

One solution to this problem has been to make the technology monumentally unreliable. Think how many "Star Trek" episodes contain transporter malfunctions. This sort of thing isn't convincing, particularly if done too often. Readers will after a while begin to ask why they don't find a way of fixing the thing - or sending it back and getting one that works.

 

Despite technological progress there are some things that don't change. People wear clothes and jewelry, ride in vehicles with wheels, cook food and eat it, write messages on flat surfaces, hold parties and get married. All these things are mentioned in the Bible - they haven't altered much in two thousand years. But there is a tendency among science fiction authors to think that the rapid changes in technology in the last hundred and fifty years will go on for ever. This leads to a school of writing in which nothing invented in the twentieth century survives to the twenty-second. Personally I don't subscribe to this - I think electrical wiring, television cameras and power tools will still exist and have the same functions. They may get a lot better but they won't go away.

 

Because of this I think it's sometimes possible to take a short cut with future technology - what I call "borrowing in fancy dress." Take a long hard look at a supersonic aeroplane. Make it a bit bigger, swap the turbines for something more powerful. Assume you have a stronger, lighter composite to make it out of. Bolt on an engine that will work in vacuum.

You've built yourself a spaceship. Put someone in it, send them somewhere, give them a big problem to sort out when they arrive. And you've got a story...