Predicting the future and optimism

At Balticon, a very nice woman brought me two books to sign. One contained a Batman story I co-wrote with Jack McDevitt, and the other was volume nine of the paperback magazine, New Destinies. Jim Baen edited this magazine, and for the ninth issue he commissioned my speculation on what PCs would be like in 2001, roughly a decade away. I was quite confident in my predictions.

My confidence was misplaced.

I predicted some things reasonably accurately, but I was wrong more than I was right. I completely missed the explosion in storage capacity and, more importantly, the vastly greater role of connectivity (read: the Internet) in 2001. Someday, I plan to write, primarily as a sort of belated gift to Jim, who of course can never read it, an analysis of my article and offer it to Eric Flint and Mike Resnick for Jim Baen's Universe. If they don't want it, I may post it here. I won't do that piece anytime soon, however, because work on Slanted Jack trumps it.

I mention the piece because it taught me that I, like most SF writers, suck at predicting the future. That's okay, though, because our job is not, in my opinion, to try to guess what awaits us; our job is to tell stories.

Still, those of us who write SF inevitably make predictions in the course of inventing future worlds. The future I've created for the Jon & Lobo series has rules, of course, but it also contains many strange and wondrous things that don't exist (to the best of my knowledge) today. Most importantly, I write about events that occur roughly 350 years from now, and people are still around. In fact, they are all over the universe, on planets spread many light-years apart, on worlds we've yet to imagine.

Positing this future, as opposed to writing about one in which global warming or plague or [insert your favorite threat here] kills us all, is, a friend pointed out to me, an inherently optimistic act. I started to argue by saying no, it's what I needed to do to write the book, but then I realized that was not true.

In my heart, despite an outer layer of cynicism and sarcasm, I believe that humanity will somehow overcome even the terrible things it has done and continue onward, if not on this world than ultimately on others. I don't consider it a sure thing, and I believe we all have to help, but I believe we can do it.

We can.