Born to do Math 135 – Woe to the Math Man (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/08
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You are writing a book now. Why? What makes this different than in the past?
Rick Rosner: The deal is, if I do not write something or a paid guild writing job in the next year, I am going to lose health insurance and will have to retire and then go on retirement guild health insurance. I don’t want to do that.
Because you take a financial hit in retiring so early. Besides, I am not fucking retired because I am still doing stuff. I have something decent, which should sell. I haven’t had my hopes dashed yet. The novel begins a year or two from now and then covers the next 15 or so years.
There is a reason for 15 years. I will not disclose this here. I won’t really disclose many of the specifics about the novel because that would wreck the fun of it. I don’t want to give everything away. I will talk about the issues involved with writing about the immediate future.
One thing is probably now more than ever before. It matters who wins the next presidential election because the character of the country will be extremely dependent on whether we have got that motherfucker in office for the next four years or if we have a democrat.
Also, whether the democrats take back the Senate too, because, at this point, the Republicans are the worst major U.S. political party since, at least, the Gilded Age. They are super corrupt. It is a fantastic period.
By fantastic, I do not mean great. I mean almost unimaginable previously to all this shit happening in a period in American history. It is crazy how shitty things are. The time period I am covering in my novel, what happens or what I can talk about, and what I have to dance around, a lot of it depends on the election of 2020.
That’s one thing that has to be addressed or danced around. Probably, the biggest movie that looks at the near future, the period that I am talking about, of the past 2 to 4 years is Her with Scarlett Johannson and Joaquin Phoenix.
It is very careful to keep its scope limited. Ex Machina is another movie probably set in the near future. It is even more limited taking place in a house with an opening scene in an office. It could be 2 or 3 or more years from now.
But there are no clues because it is just in a house. But Her goes out and is filmed in Singapore, which has futuristic architecture. Everyone wears futuristic clothing, high-waisted pants. But not everything is overall too different.
I haven’t taken a census of the relative number of books from different periods to the near, medium, to the far future. But I think writing about the future depends on the nature of the book. A book set 5 years from now about 3 sisters and their relationship.
You can make it seem like it is set in the future by making it seem like the sisters have a few devices, and taking forms of transportation that are now available. If you keep the focus on how people are affected by modern technology, any author is going to have to dance around the not being able to get the specifics of the future right.
We know the stars of 2032. You can do jokey references to Madonna trying to be sexy 8 years from now, when she is 68. It is a tough thing because the specifics are important in the near future. They come out of the present in which we live.
If you write about 800 years from now, you can put Ryan Gosling in it. You could say this with helps of advanced medical technology. But most aspects of 2350 will not have much of a relationship to the cultural ephemera of now.
Although, it is a mistake that sloppy science fiction writers make, trying to build bridges between now and 800 years from now by having characters interested in shit from now. One character will say, “Have you ever seen Pulp Fiction?” It is like, “Fuck no!” Nobody cares about that stuff.
It is like asking about The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. It is fucking forever ago and apparently a good novel. So, the farther future has fewer issues of cultural ephemera. One is cultural ephemera as an issue and then carrying it into the future.
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