The Pitfalls of Sci-Fi

Writing sci-fi is trickier than it looks. There are benefits of course, freedom to do pretty much whatever you want being a main one. However there are many problems. The first and foremost is the rapid technological advances we see in our everyday lives.

Do you remember during the last decade when sci-fi shows used to have people running around with bluetooth earpieces? They were considered high tech and futuristic at that point. Now though they just date the shows horrible because bluetooth earpieces have become a technological dead end.

Star Trek suffers as well. Apparently they no longer have email in the 24^th Century because Starfleet officers are forever passing vital information to each other on hand held devices. At least these are vaguely similar to a modern tablet computer but seem to lack the same sort of versatility.

These problems come about because the writer is doing their writing in the now. It can be very difficult to distance yourself from that to occupy another time frame. I struggle with it myself. Despite my current novel being set nearly 400 years in the future I had a character thinking it pretentious to use voice commands to a computer. When my girlfriend read it she pointed out how strange that was. Surely if this character has grown up surrounded by this technology it wouldn't be pretentious at all.

She is right. There wasn't really anything in the story, or the character's background, to warrant him thinking it was pretentious. I'll have to rewrite that bit now.