05-16-2015, 03:17 AM
Just a quick thought or two now, but will reply more extensively when I'm on a proper keyboard...
Re the books, I've seen or heard about authors being very heavy handed re some particular hobby horse, not just tech. On the one hand it can be the mark of an author who needs to refine their craft or avoid letting their personal feelings take over their writing to such a degree that they produce an author tract.
On the other hand, I would suggest that a lot of fiction about new tech can be divided into two broad categories:
A) stories about the development of a tech
B) stories about the impact of the tech on the human race
The former may spend some amount of time on the failures and difficulties that precede success. Although, unless the author is a scientist in that field themselves this can be tricky to do. The latter is more likely to skip the issues around development because it's focus is about how the tech might change things, and is often also focused on the cool stuff it can do. The actual development gets glossed over because that's secondary to what the story is about.
A final thought on this: a story that realistically depicted the development of a new tech, failures and all, and then went on to explore the implications in any depth would be a very long story and perhaps rather hard to write in anything less than several volumes. Which might explain why such are so rare.
Re the timeline, I agree it could use some tweaking. The hard part is figuring out what and how to do so. More thoughts on this but will wait until I'm home tonight and on my laptop.
Todd
Re the books, I've seen or heard about authors being very heavy handed re some particular hobby horse, not just tech. On the one hand it can be the mark of an author who needs to refine their craft or avoid letting their personal feelings take over their writing to such a degree that they produce an author tract.
On the other hand, I would suggest that a lot of fiction about new tech can be divided into two broad categories:
A) stories about the development of a tech
B) stories about the impact of the tech on the human race
The former may spend some amount of time on the failures and difficulties that precede success. Although, unless the author is a scientist in that field themselves this can be tricky to do. The latter is more likely to skip the issues around development because it's focus is about how the tech might change things, and is often also focused on the cool stuff it can do. The actual development gets glossed over because that's secondary to what the story is about.
A final thought on this: a story that realistically depicted the development of a new tech, failures and all, and then went on to explore the implications in any depth would be a very long story and perhaps rather hard to write in anything less than several volumes. Which might explain why such are so rare.
Re the timeline, I agree it could use some tweaking. The hard part is figuring out what and how to do so. More thoughts on this but will wait until I'm home tonight and on my laptop.
Todd