There are six people living in space right now. There are people printing prototypes of human organs, and people printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh and the human electrical system.
We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are getting ready to launch three satellites the size of coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone apps.
Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of computing power and an eight-track tape deck.
In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on your phone, because this is the present time and these things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.
That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic. And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.
Use the rear view mirror for its true purpose. If I were sitting next to you twenty-five years ago, and you heard a phone ring, and I took out a bar of glass and said, sorry, my phone just told me it’s got new video of a solar flare, you’d have me sectioned in a flash. Use the rear view mirror to imagine telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS. This is the last generation in the Western world that will ever be lost. LifeStraws. Synthetic biology. Genetic sequencing. SARS was genetically sequenced within 48 hours of its identification. I’m not even touching the web, wifi, mobile broadband, cloud computing, electronic cigarettes…
Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.
Day: December 13, 2015
Looking for the fluff instead of the smut
Fandom Veteran Gothic
- One of your favorite old fics has been taken down. You can find it on Wayback Machine, but it’s only the original Geocities site. The font is Comic Sans and there’s a tiled repeating background of stars obscuring the cyan text.
- You read a fic at some point in a fandom you no longer participate in. You want to re-read the fic, but the title and pen name of the author keep escaping you. You don’t even know where it was posted. You can find dozens of other fics with a similar concept but not that one.
- An author you used to follow moved their work from their personal website to their friends-locked blog. You sent them a request three months ago. It is still marked “pending.” You wonder if you will ever get to read their work again.
- You get a follower out of nowhere. Their screen name is familiar. It’s the person you RPed explicit chat logs with when you were sixteen. You’ve changed screen names four times since then and don’t know how they found you.
- You forgot the password to your old FanFiction.net account. There are terrible relics of your past as a writer archived there. They must be destroyed. You can’t recover the password because the email account no longer exists, and the site isn’t answering your emails.
- You were in this fandom when it was small and just getting started. Now there’s a whole expanded universe of new material, and you just want to read fics in your original fandom. Only the new characters are popular.
- Three fandoms later, you run into someone you had fandom drama with five years ago. You wonder if they ever forgave you for your part in what happened. You’re too shy to ask. Interactions are tense and you go your separate ways. You travel the same fandom circles for a while, but never speak.
- You have WIPs on your hard drive from years and fandoms ago. You want to finish them, but the fandoms are no longer active. You wonder if anyone would read them if they were done. You sometimes open them
and wistfully read their partially-finished stories.
THIS ALL OF THIS OH MY GOD
kototyph 