Born to do Math 136 – Woe to the Math Man (2)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How will these cultural ephemera issues feed into the future?
Rick Rosner: Now, I may just blatantly have people from now just make up shit that they are doing in the future, which I don’t think is weak to libel or slander. I think libel is printed to things in the future because, obviously, you’re not trying to claim that they are doing that shit because it is the future.
It is hard to come up with near future devices that don’t sound bullshitty. But you have to bite the bullet and do it. Uber is a non-sense word. Google is largely a non-sense word. The words that have come into being for devices are all these made-up words.
If you are having to bring new devices into your world, you’re either going to have to make them later versions of existing devices or give them new names. It will be unsatisfying. Because, obviously, you are not going to get it right and people will see what you’re doing.
“Oh, you’re taking semi-non-sense words and having them do something with what is its function, like Lift. You are getting a lift. Or Uber, they are Uber cars. They are everywhere, super cars. The words have a little bit to do with the function.”
So, you just got to do the same thing in making up new products that the actual makers of new products have to do. It is not going to be entirely convincing. You are going to have to hope that what you’re saying about the culture and the events are compelling enough and/or funny enough to overcome the problem of readers saying, “I see what you’re doing.”
There’s an issue of extrapolation by going too far or not far enough, or in fashion. When I was a teen, when I really young, there were two books by a guy named John Brunner, which were near future histories set in the U.S.
We mentioned them before: The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar. They were science fiction when science fiction was very niche. They probably didn’t sell that much, as this was before science fiction books became bestsellers.
It was left to science fiction readers rather than everybody. Dune is science fiction. The Lord of the Rings is not but is lumped in with science fiction (as it is fantasy). Brunner’s books probably did not. But they tried to address what the U.S. would look like over the next 10 or 20 years starting in roughly 1968.
I don’t remember many details. But I remember that the one detail that jumps out at me is that, in the future women wore skirts that were so short where you could just barely see their underwear all the time, basically. It was a kind of extrapolation from the miniskirts of 1968.
His additional detail was that the underwear had fake pubes in day glow colors attached to the front of the underwear. It took the extrapolation and added a little bit of a curve to the raw extrapolation, a little bit of a creative filler or doodad.
I like that. Also, when I read it, I was probably 14 or 12. I was super horny.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Anyway, that’s what you got to do. But there’s a truism about science fiction. That everything depicted in science fiction will eventually happen, but it will take longer. This guy writing in 1967/68 has people’s underwear being on view in the late 70s.
That did become a thing. He was right. But it didn’t become a thing until the 21st century, where, now, performers, like Ariana Grande or whoever, just go out on stage in a lyotard. It was correct. But it just took 30 or 35 years instead of 10 years.
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