🟣Go ahead, dream about the future
Every science fiction writer has a story about a time when the future arrived too soon. I have a lot of those stories. Like, OK, for example: years ago, I was writing a story where the government starts using drones to kill people. I thought that this was a really intense, futuristic idea, but by the time the story was published, the government was already using drones to kill people.
Our world is changing so fast, and there's a kind of accelerating feedback loop where technological change and social change feed on each other. When I was a kid in the 1980s, we knew what the future was going to look like. It was going to be some version of "Judge Dredd" or "Blade Runner." It was going to be neon megacities and flying vehicles. But now, nobody knows what the world is going to look like even in just a couple years, and there are so many scary apparitions lurking on the horizon. From climate catastrophe to authoritarianism, everybody is obsessed with apocalypses, even though the world ends all the time, and we keep going.
Don't be afraid to think about the future, to dream about the future, to write about the future. I've found it really liberating and fun to do that. It's a way of vaccinating yourself against the worst possible case of future shock. It's also a source of empowerment, because you cannot prepare for something that you haven't already visualized. But there's something that you need to know. You don't predict the future; you imagine the future.
So as a science fiction writer whose stories often take place years or even centuries from now, I've found that people are really hungry for visions of the future that are both colorful and lived in, but I found that research on its own is not enough to get me there. Instead, I use a mixture of active dreaming and awareness of cutting-edge trends in science and technology and also insight into human history. I think a lot about what I know of human nature and the way that people have responded in the past to huge changes and upheavals and transformations. And I pair that with an attention to detail, because the details are where we live. We tell the story of our world through the tools we create and the spaces that we live in. And at this point, it's helpful to know a couple of terms that science fiction writers use all of the time: "future history" and "second-order effects."
Now, future history is basically just what it sounds like. It is a chronology of things that haven't happened yet, like Robert A. Heinlein's famous story cycle, which came with a detailed chart of upcoming events going up into the year 2100. Or, for my most recent novel, I came up with a really complicated time line that goes all the way to the 33rd century and ends with people living on another planet.
Meanwhile, a second-order effect is basically the kind of thing that happens after the consequences of a new technology or a huge change. There's a saying often attributed to writer and editor Frederik Pohl that "A good science fiction story should predict not just the invention of the automobile, but also the traffic jam."
And speaking of traffic jams, I spent a lot of time trying to picture the city of the future. What's it like? What's it made of? Who's it for? I try to picture a green city with vertical farms and structures that are partially grown rather than built and walkways instead of streets, because nobody gets around by car anymore -- a city that lives and breathes. And, you know, I kind of start by daydreaming the wildest stuff that I can possibly come up with, and then I go back into research mode, and I try to make it as plausible as I can by looking at a mixture of urban futurism, design porn and technological speculation. And then I go back, and I try to imagine what it would actually be like to be inside that city. So my process kind of begins and ends with imagination, and it's like my imagination is two pieces of bread in a research sandwich