Born to do Math 137 – Woe to the Math Man (3)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/09/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the general problems in science fiction?
Rick Rosner: Sometimes, or even often, science fiction is built around addressing a specific aspect of the future world. For instance, I just finished The Murder Bot Diaries, which I just finished and highly recommend set about 300 years from now.
It is an AI plus some human brain matter security robot of the future. He is called “Murder Bot.” He calls himself the Murder Bot. I came in on the 3rd and 4th ones. I don’t know the beginning. But he is really good at killing other robots.
He does security. That’s what he does. Actually, it does a semi-decent job of depicting a lot of the aspects of the future. It is really good. I like it. They work this into the culture with Murder Bot taking a lot of time in storage.
A lot of time is spent in transit between space stations or planets. I don’t know if he ever goes down to a planet. Basically, he watches T.V. and movies. So, at least, those are part of the future world. But we never see what like is like on planets.
Basically, he spends a lot of time in space offices and space hotels built around as hubs to space stations. He spends a lot of time on rocket ships and a lot of one novel on a terraforming craft floating above the surface of a planet.
But the world isn’t fully fleshed out because the books concentrate on the adventures of this security robot and the people that he protects. Now, probably, the author has a much more fleshed out view of the world based on all the thinking she had to do to write these four novels.
At the same time, her thinking is not presented beyond the books. If you could sit her down and ask her, “What is like on Earth like? How many planets been colonized? How does your FTL drive work? What were the aliens who brought FTL drive who discovered it? How did we stumble upon the aliens work?”
She would be able to answer a lot of questions about how the world would be. Her thinking does not need to be as laid out and non-contradictory as if she were writing. Maybe, in her other books, things take place on the planets Murder Bot is in; and she has a fleshed out picture of what it is going to be like.
But! That’s not necessarily clear from the Murder Bot series. That’s, often, the case with stuff like Star Trek. Star Trek very seldom goes to Earth. In the first series of Star Trek, the one with Spock and Kirk. If they went to Earth, it was in a different period or going back in time to the Nazi period.
I am not sure. In that, I think there were 88 episodes of the original Star Trek. I am not sure that they ever touched down on planet Earth in whatever fucking year it is supposed to be. So, everything happened on the freaking Starship Enterprise or on some alien planet.
So, they didn’t have to flesh out what life was like on Earth. Or where it was fleshed out, obviously, people are still walking around in human bodies almost entirely augmented. You don’t get augmented human bodies until the Borg enter in one of the series.
By the way, there’s a whole sex scandal that led to Obama becoming Senator from Illinois that involves a borg, Seven of Nine, the actress Jei Ryan. Her husband was a perve and wanted her to do shit. People should look her up and her sex scandal.
She did not do anything pervy, but she was married to a perv. It is interesting how a Star Trek actress’s fucked up marriage led to Obama becoming president. There are all these issues with depicting the future.
Unlike the far future, the near future, if you want to do a good job of it, you need to flesh out the world. I am only starting to try doing it with predicting our devices in a not lazy and extrapolating way. That they will be bigger or smaller. Or that you’ll wear them on your wrist.
Shit that is easy to predict or boring to predict. I did come up with an idea that will happen with our devices that will be fun. Actually, there is some accuracy to it. But I won’t tell it here.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 