Attention: Near-future Science Fiction Writers!

Jan 30, 2009 at 12:34 AM
2 comments

When you next sit down to start extrapolating current trends in information technology and communications engineering for the purpose of envisioning what might be possible in the foreseeable future, would it kill you to find an actual information and communications engineering specialist who knows something about what are the insurmountable problems due to the laws of physics, and to buy that guy— sadly, it's almost always a guy— buy that guy a beer and ask him whether your cool whizzy SFnal idea on which you hope to hang your whole story is even remotely scientifically plausible?

Example: I have completely lost my patience with @FAMOUS_AUTHORS who utterly fail to comprehend A) It's The Latency Stupid, B) More CPUs ≠ Faster Algorithm Execution, and C) Global Multicast is Insecure and Unmanageable. I can sort of understand not grasping one or two of these concepts, but all three of them? Come on. Guys, you're not even trying, are you?

Without naming the guilty whose books I've read recently, let me just say that I'm particularly tired of the SFnal tropes that involve either A) unmanaged, zero-configuration, anarcho-utopian wide-area Wi-Fi mesh networks with the latency, bandwidth and error characteristics of highly redundant, subterranean fiber optic networks linked by big iron switches in hardened central offices; or B) emergent, sapient personalities hosted by digital processing functions embedded in a vast distributed global internet of small, commodity, even disposable devices.

I mean, at least when the previous generation decided to hand-wave over the small problem of how faster-than-light travel/communication is supposed to be possible, they were pretty open about it. They would at least go to the trouble of making up some bullshit technobabble about how some future scientist would get the credit for discovering the super-double-secret SF/F magick that allowed such stuff to happen despite our best current understanding of physics saying otherwise. Is that so goddamn difficult for you to do, too?

Seriously. I know you guys are hella freaking smart— much smarter than me. I know this because I hear it all the goddamn time. So why do I want to slap you for pretending to be stupid when I read your books? Why!?