Kerrie Murphy | October 14, 2008
NOW don't panic, but Defrag probably should warn you that we are running out of future. It's like breakfast cereal. One day there's plenty of it and the next, you're wondering if you can be bothered eating the powdery crumbs at the bottom of the packet.
Also, the future tastes good with milk and a few dried cranberries.Now when we say that we're running out of future, we don't mean that the end of the world is nigh, although if it turns out that it is, we're totally taking credit for predicting it. Suck it, Nostradamus.
Instead, we're talking about having enough future for science fiction writers to still be fictional.
Writing on his website (www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html), Scottish science fiction writer Charles Stross notes: "We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF."
Since his site is optimised for HTML 3.2, Stross's difficulties may in fact arise because he is living in the past, but he argues that because of the time it takes to write and publish a novel, any ideas about what the future is like will be as current as making jokes about Russell Crowe throwing phones (explanatory note to any Rove writers who may be reading: jokes about Russell Crowe and phones are not current).
Up until this point, Defrag was unaware that in science fiction points were awarded for accuracy.
However, Stross was not talking about the ability to specifically predict what the near future will look like.
Rather he suggests that because current events influence how writers conceive of the future (sci-fi books in the 1950s had a lot of metaphors for communism), the events they are referencing now will be passe by the time the book comes out.
This is not good news. Science fiction writers have a hard enough time of it as it is.
First, whenever a sci-fi writer is asked what they do for a living, they have to watch people's faces go from impressed that they are a writer to afeared that they are going to start talking about Klingons.
Then, if a writer is successful, the sci-fi fanbase is a passionate one that becomes vocally upset if a new work fails to match their existing vision.
Defrag knows: we contemplated kidnapping Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer, a man with whom we otherwise have no beef, and locking him a giant bug catcher when we heard that he had been commissioned to write the next Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book now that Douglas Adams has died.
Clearly, we need to do something to help these writers out, but starting another cold war just to give them consistent inspiration seems not only expensive, but time-consuming.
This is why we think we should all focus on not having any more changes on the planet to give the writers some breathing room.
Perhaps we could focus our energies on going back to existing works of science fiction and making the predictions therein accurate.
Defrag volunteers to be the green alien chick that gets to make out with a young Captain Kirk.
He was kind of a hottie back then.
TOP 10
Wired.com's excellent Lore Sjoberg has compiled a list of the geekiest cruises, including the Caribbean Gambit Chess Cruise. Here are the top 10 ways you can tell you're on a geek cruise.
10.The Open Source Cruise sinks ... because everybody insisted on open portals.
9.The cruise doesn't involve leaving your bedroom: it's virtual.
8.The itinerary doesn't specify ports of call, it lists GPS co-ordinates.
7.You get 49 out of 50 on Trivia Night and finish last.
6.The only fancy dress outfit in the ship's store is Spiderman and it is permanently out, even when there is not a fancy dress ball on.
5.The only food served at the buffet is from the food group Fast and all the drinks contain extra caffeine.
4.The disco has been transformed into a Dungeons and Dragons game room.
3.There is 10,000km of ethernet cable on a spool at the docks because all the wireless network options lose too many packets.
2.At the end of the cruise everyone's tans are exactly the same as they were at the start: pasty white.
1.The cruise covers the seven seas: C, C++, Visual C, C# ...
Contributors: Peter Monk, Don Knowles, Kylie Carson, Jen Lofgren, Michael Shephard, Bill Veldmeyer, Stephen Bardell, Iain Kennedy, Edward Mallett and Tim Borten
Next week: A study by Harris Interactive shows the mobile is the most important determinant of social status after clothes among US teenagers. Send us the top 10 signs your phone lacks cred. Answers by Thursday please to: OzDefrag@Gmail.com