Inventing future tech

[Laer Carroll]

Writers of futuristic fiction must “invent” the futuristic technology in their stories. It takes much skill to make it convincing, yet spend few words on it so that it stays in the background. Otherwise it would take attention from people and their activities which are the main focus of stories.

Here are some tips drawn from my experience as an aerospace software and systems engineer.

Separate the WHAT and the HOW of future tech. In engineering this is known as separating requirements and design. You first say what you want a new product to do and completely ignore how it can do it. There are whole books on this “requirements engineering” process. These include long checklists of capabilities, such as how fast (or slow) a new thing works, how much energy it can use and for how long, and much more. If the product will be physical, requirements can include weight and size.

How the product works is only looked at when the “what” is OK’d by all “shareholders” - everyone concerned with the product, such as financiers, marketers, and users both individual and collective. You the writer are lucky; you don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of hours working this out. You just describe the tech and its workings - briefly! - and go on with story.

STEAL where you can. Engineers in every field nowadays never invent something from scratch if we can re-use some other product or combination of products suitably modified. If some off-the-shelf product is good enough (as defined by requirements) we use it straight away. This is not just cheapness. OTS products usually have had long and rigorous testing both in the lab and by users. They are also available in large quantities cheaply.

Sci-fi writers, of course, have a big selection of OTS products. Hyperdrives, for instance, are available in many kinds and capabilities! You may have to do some minor “mods” so that yours doesn’t seem too imitative. But don’t waste too much time on this. In engineering one of the oldest principles is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And “Better is the enemy of good-enough.”

Think SYSTEMS. Technological products never exist in isolation. Your future tech will seem more convincing if you include a few mentions of the other tech which makes it possible. Cell phones, for instance, exist because of web-works of cell towers. GPS car dashboard products work because of satellites orbiting the planet.

Most of these systems work in the background and require no more than a mention, if that. But they can also provide plot pivot points if, for instance, a supporting system breaks down or (better!) is sabotaged.

Think LIMITS. All tech has limits. Your blaster will be more convincing if you have to swap batteries during a gun fight, or find that bad guys have emptied your weapon. Your teleporter will seem more real if your character must switch from a local to a national “line.” Or be delayed if the ground-to-orbit line goes offline for maintenance - possibly allowing your main characters to meet while waiting.

That’s it. I could go on. But a story calls! Add your own suggestions below.

 

[Wojciehowicz]

Think SYSTEMS. Technological products never exist in isolation. Your future tech will seem more convincing if you include a few mentions of the other tech which makes it possible. Cell phones, for instance, exist because of web-works of cell towers. GPS car dashboard products work because of satellites orbiting the planet.

This is lost on NASA, ironically. The intention is to go to Mars without any navigational, communication, power, or observational satellites, which we take for granted here on Earth. I've been working on a story in the background --it's low priority right now-- about taking a proper planned approach to going to space, but doing it at high speed. Send everything ahead of time, including space stations, so astronauts have accommodations and then some already waiting for them. But with alien civilizations that have been around a long time, it comes up a lot less for me.

Think LIMITS. All tech has limits. Your blaster will be more convincing if you have to swap batteries during a gun fight, or find that bad guys have emptied your weapon.

For hard science, maybe, but it is usually assumed that any civilization that actually adopts energy weapons only does so after solving the problem of an energy source equal to the application: compact, light weight, high capacity, and high energy output per unit time (yes, I know that isn't humans, who usually only think in gee whiz consumerist terms right now in 2011). If I had a rifle-sized coilgun with a 5 mile per second capability but only 30 round power supply, it's a sniper rifle for extreme circumstances, not an infantry weapon. Your idea DEFINITELY needs to be kept in mind for near-term hard sci-fi. C.A.D.S. by John Sievert could have used this.

It also depends on the technology level being supposed. If I'm claiming a direct mass-energy converter (equal to matter-antimatter, just without the antimatter part) or even a perfect rapid decay chain metastable superheavy isomer (much closer to being doable within a few decades), that's a level of power that even at strategic level is massive and not really in danger of exhaustion easily. Unless of course the converter tends to eat itself a whole lot, or the fuel is rare and they have enough for the "we have only one shot so let's make it good" cliffhanger moment convention.

Your teleporter will seem more real if your character must switch from a local to a national “line.” Or be delayed if the ground-to-orbit line goes offline for maintenance - possibly allowing your main characters to meet while waiting.

Maybe, if your technology is compatible with such a thing. With wormholes, probably not as much. Sure, you could postulate networkable wormhole systems, and I have, but you're already departing from the harder edge of sci-fi for simple plot device invention to move things along. Also, I would expect a sane civilization (read: not humans, see the Mars thing above) to have maximum redundancy and spare capacity before deploying any such transport system.

Note also that in the Trek reboot, they jumped ahead to transport at warp. They could barely do that in TNG and then only by matching speeds. I think they wanted to ignore rationality in pseudoscience just to break any story leash from transporter technology. If you can transport anywhere at any speed differential no matter the distance, then you really don't need starships the same way you used to. Send the ship ahead of time via automation and when sensors say all clear, transport the crew to the ship. Treat ships as work platforms, not actual living environments for permanent occupation.

On the other hand, if you can do this, and some of the aliens in my story can, then what are the drawbacks? This is what I would add to your main thrust. If a technology can be done and deployed, there are always reasons that it should not be, which have to be considered. We can easily do nuclear everything in terms of transport. We don't because the dangers remain too high. A civilization with widespread interstellar teleport would need to have a lot of safeguards against misuse. Not every civilization has the same moral and ethical frameworks; some are going to want to use it unwisely from the POV of another party.

Another reason not to deploy would be illustrated by the TNG story Unnatural Selection. Unless we're absolutely fail-safe, an active immunity technology might just destroy the food chain by eliminating microbes that are anathema to one species but are necessary to one or more others as part of their digestive process, or which are symbiotic in their sphere of the environment (lots of nasty things in soil can kill you, but without them, no composting, no soil, no plant life). Something that monitors genetic deformation and actively hunts it to correct it might accidentally make everyone the same by not handling genetic variations correctly. Imagine a world where everyone ends up looking like Rondo Hatton. An improvement in one area might destroy another.

I'd also consider some of the ramifications of any given technology. If you can do A, then B, C, D, and E might follow. You have to consider reasons why they are or are not done. Did they simply get missed? Or was it a sociocultural issue? Example: one species I invented mastered full prosthetic bodies, but for other lifeforms only. They have a cultural streak of purism and fatalism that in combination cause them to not only not replace their own bodies with android shells, but they also turn up chances to cure a lot of common debilitating conditions such as an analog of arthritis. Users of solutions to those usually go offworld to get treatment, but there's a social stigma to not simply accepting your fate.

Another thing to consider: realistic impediments. Look at Trek. The navigational deflector was brilliant to postulate because there is no way a ship can do FTL safely through interstellar dust and debris without being destroyed in cumulative collisions (short of hyperspace or similar). In the Trek reboot, they ignored that and warped right into Titan's atmosphere. The hit would have destroyed the Enterprise spectacularly if you consider that at TNG technology they couldn't ignore gas and dust that dense, never mind in Kirk's early years. That reboot really jumped the realism shark.

I'd also consider culture when it comes to weapons. Some cultures might prefer swords to projectile or directed energy weapons, even after interstellar flight was achieved. Why? Because they like their culture and it is a vital part of it and vital to their philosophies. A sword is serious business. Using it properly, quickly, and with humane efficiency requires training, commitment, and focus. Therefore, if that species prefers peace to war, they must keep the sword because the use of it is so much more difficult to avoid direct personal involvement in violence; the stakes are a lot higher. So, they would tend to regard the carrying of the sword as a reminder of the deep and important need to be emotionally balanced and humbly comported so as to always tend towards avoiding conflict.

Another example: the Zentraedi of Robotech had no problem with weapons that wiped out cities like someone shooting beer cans. Humans do. Humans have a certain power point that they are viscerally frightened of. Beyond that, they are progressively frightened and awed. We really should deploy high yield fusion weapons in space for certain demolition needs, but the sociocultural aspects of modern humans almost totally preclude that. We're afraid of misuse, and we're even afraid of their proper use.

That's what I've got to add. Cultural, social, and psychological aspects need to be considered.

 

[APCarroll]

Lovely read, Wojciehowicz. I'll probably build upon some of your points on culture and necessity in this post.

The way I write is usually entirely scientific - at the base, at least. All things can be generalized on and organized together, to use some big sciency words. First, you'll have to observe the fundaments of science and what it stands for, before you even begin to think about the tools all the peasants on your third-orbital Alpha Centauri planet use. I would suggest memorizing this:

"Science cannot promise eternal truths, only the elimination of false hypotheses and the establishment of what is currently the most likely explanation to an aspect of reality."

This is every last detail of science in one sentence. There is literally nothing missing. Every gun you think up must be created out of pleasure and then adequately compromised until it makes sense, while at the same time retaining its initial awesome.

The best way to go about this is to form the story around things that don't completely work. For example, I really liked the rifles used in a cartoon called The Second Renaissance Pt.2, although they seemed pretty worthless in theory. Rather than grieving over it or just casting it aside, I decided to start thinking out cultural points that would coincide with the design of the rifle. It was mostly like one of the modern rifle models, like the M16 or M4, although it had three parallel metal cylinders connected by bridges (like the AK-47) and two spikes coming out of the top and bottom ones.

I argued that the top and bottom cylinders allotted stability, and the two spikes were minor nuclear missiles that could generate severe annihilation based on multiple settings that could be adjusted digitally on the rifle itself. It could function as anything from a grenade to a blockbuster - and there were two outfitted on each gun, fired from a small switch on either cylinder. They were nuclear powered as well, so they only detonated if fired, and otherwise it wouldn't detonate by being jostled or whilst eviscerating the enemy's skull, the human skull being one of the most impregnable items in nature.

Of course, this argument still wouldn't survive unless I included a whole catalogue of events in the book and cultural relativities. I think that mine is still in the works; a good technology invention in literature is one that is immediately accepted, or whose argument is immediately drawn to a close.

It certainly takes lots of explaining or lots of though. Consider it as being a science of necessity for one reason or another. We don't need guns to kill; we need guns to keep humans in order, even if it means killing off a large body of them. As well, take into consideration what it is that created the technology; the Kalashnikov rifle was Square 2 of the German MP44 and similar rifles from World War 2, only it was made to be slightly more streamlined and most powerful in general; the M4 is a smaller and more versatile version of the M16, made for clearing rooms and engaging in medium-range combat; the MAC-10 was a submachine gun developed specifically for special-operations teams, for clearing out very close quarters - therefore, the MAC-10 is not very accurate.

So, to break it down, I'll condense this all into a few points:

- Be prepared to argue the necessity and reasoning behind every aspect of your invention, and then apply these arguments to its design.Treat it like a game of knowledge, where every single point is definitely going to be scoffed at and ridiculed by some pesky critic.

- Your story revolves around the objects you introduce, and this invention is a very important object. If you're going to introduce an idea, be prepared to form your story around it, or else you'll have to form the idea itself around the story, and everything will be depreciated in quality.

- Don't make it an abrasive idea. Make it easy to transcend and easy to utilize. Even easier, develop it out of something that exists now by changing things step by step until you've achieved something good.

- Like the last step: take everything in steps. Don't jump to conclusions at any point in time.

- Most importantly: just make sure it's a good idea. Don't judge by what you want or think you want in the story. If you actually want it, then there's nothing more to consider; just spend time reasoning it out and everything will come out fine.

 

[Wojciehowicz]

I think it could be added here that this is not the early days of sci-fi and we're not writing to the same audience as then. We're in a really skeptical time now. Zone Troopers was an awesome movie for incorporating 20s and 30s era sci-fi artistic coolness, and probably the last real one short of Flash Gordon. I even considered a gee-whiz rocket sci-fi opera but it never gelled and I instead kept the only specific thing I envisioned, the gentle aquatic Tostroveed, and incorporated them into Outpost Earth.

That audience of today might not take to our inventions of the future because they don't think about these things. Cyberbrain implants sound neat, until you consider hacking, viruses, etc. and then they don't sound so neat. Remember Relics on ST:TNG? I liked the old Enterprise not being rejected. Simple, solid, built at a time of increasing contact with aggressive alien civilizations, very positive controls like a fighter jet, very obvious settings and states. A switch is very much less given to failure than a digital control. It made sense, but today's audiences would never accept it, hence the coolness of the new Trek movie's look. Big curved surfaces, controls like Windows 7 touch screens, etc., and entirely not suited for high-risk work.

I guess it comes around to the argument over Stephanie Meyer and hack writing. We HAVE to guess what the public will buy if we want to sell anything at all, much less shoot at being successful. If we want to move outside the smallest niches of the sci-fi browsers at Borders and get looked at for adaptation to television or movies (which is really what any writer looking to make a paying career should be at least considering) we have to gauge what they will consume and go with it, or settle for remaining so-so in a subculture. I'd love to adapt Demon with a Glass Hand to the modern screen, but Harlan Ellison is known to be protective of his work, wouldn't allow it to be twisted to fit today if he wasn't the one doing it, and as-is, it won't work as it did way back when.

 

[hippokrene]

Your teleporter will seem more real if your character must switch from a local to a national “line.”

If I read this in a book, I wouldn't think 'realistic' but 'humorous.'

 

[Wojciehowicz]

If I read this in a book, I wouldn't think 'realistic' but 'humorous.'

If you consider security, the ability to point-to-point teleport with no defense against it is stupid if everyone is not beyond the thought of criminal action. It makes sense to have 'firewalls' for control of teleportation of everything. You avoid any misuse by default, and if no one does anything stupid, they never know they passed through any security measures. Of course, they'd have to have open access to the government's security logs, and those logs would have to be non-falsifiable with heavy encryption and nearly impossible to fake signatures. Then both society and government could trust each other and know that only illicit things were detoured, and know exactly where, when, and why.

EDIT: I should add that given economies of scale, local, interlocal, national, and international systems would actually be very smart. Pipes for data and energy at the size you wire a house to the phone company central office make no sense from the USA to France, but gigantic capacity fiber-op lines do.

 

[A. Lynn]

This is great stuff!

My particular challenge has always been in espionage and infiltration categories. Oh sure, the main characters can just go through the vents of the evil villain's lair (because after all nobody has ever thought of that) to win the day, but let's be honest.

What should we keep in mind in moments like these? Does anybody have any thoughts? I hope somebody can post thoughts on this soon.

 

[Wojciehowicz]

This is great stuff!

My particular challenge has always been in espionage and infiltration categories. Oh sure, the main characters can just go through the vents of the evil villain's lair (because after all nobody has ever thought of that) to win the day, but let's be honest.

What should we keep in mind in moments like these? Does anybody have any thoughts? I hope somebody can post thoughts on this soon.

Air ducts are of course one of the tropes nearly everyone in scriptwriting detests along with cell phones conveniently not working. Although, there are good biological reasons to not filling ducts with dust and microbe gathering things just to block people. If you've ever done duct cleaning, you know what I mean. Then again, in a sci-fi setting they might gamma ray sterilize the ducts after hours. Oops, another spy got irradiated to death.

Breaking encryption is another one that should be a no-no. PGP cannot be broken by all the computers on Earth in the remaining habitable lifetime of the planet given the sun's progression in the main sequence. Sorry paranoiacs, but the government can't simply hack into encrypted files. They use such encryption themselves. When it comes to you and me, a court orders you to turn over passwords, keys, and so on or face infinite detention on contempt of court. Encrypt a file at max strength, delete the private and public keys used, send it to the NSA, and they are not going to decrypt it before mankind has evolved a few species further along. In which case, who cares? Encrypting hard drive controller, boot encryption, file system encryption, OS encryption, file level encryption, inside an encrypted virtual drive volume, inside an encrypted virtual machine image, with encryption inside that, and it will be less accessible than an essay on deconstruction by a liberal arts major.

The place to strike is of course where the data is in plain text, which means trojan sort of attack. But setting up the story is not always easy.

Ghost in the Shell SAC 2ndGig covered using someone else's full-body prosthetic with your own braincase. An obsessive woman stole another woman's body and threw her braincase away, substituting her own.

Likewise, you could use nanotech to provide a cover, or telepathic cloak as I have in my story, or you could use genetic modifications such as in Farscape in Bringing Home the Beacon.

Or, as I also have in my story, psychics who can take over others and use them as puppets, or simply look through their eyes at will, much as they do technologically in GiTS.

There's always doing it through biology and mechanics, such as implanting a nanotech device that records everything and then recovering it from the body later. Let's say, the spy injects, then later kills, and then collects the info from the bodies at the morgue.

Or there is information manipulation getting the other side to tell you want you want to know because they can't stop themselves. If you let them know you have a very small nuclear weapon somewhere and about where it is, when their spy satellites find it accurately, you now know exactly how good their satellites are, especially if it is surrounded by decoys requiring high resolution and fine contrast to pick out the right one. Or, you bluff and tell the other side you know where something is based on a very well studied guess. Then their egos or fear or both come to the fore and they screw up.

If you want to hear a closed room, a laser based system can do it right now. If you want to do it from orbit, some sort of tightly focused gravitational system might be posited, or microwormholes. I use that last one. It's like a pinhole camera anywhere you want it to be, allowing of course for gravitational distortions or purposeful defenses. I also allow for psychic manipulation of causality and reality to affect it (showing instead a near parallel universe, instead of this actual one, or, letting said psychic affect the viewer's mind from the other end).

And of course, the usual invisibility cloaks, ala GiTS, or Predator.

 

[Expendable]

I've always enjoyed John Moore's Heroics for Beginners, a fun fantasy book but one that starts off with a booby-trapped ventilation duct.

When you stop to think about it, you don't want to be caught with a bunch of gadgets as you're going through customs - what better way to announce that you're a spy? Especially now when full-body x-rays are being done in airports, how do you hide anything?

Sure, there's always the diplomatic pouch route - but that depends on there being an embassy and being able to smuggle whatever was in the pouch out to you (and visa versa). Or giving something innocent a secret function, like the escape gear that WW2 pilots would fly in with like tiny compasses hidden in buttons and shoe heels. Or special monopoly sets that hid real money under monopoly money and playing cards that pealed off to reveal maps.

Repurposing is often your best bet - modifying what's available and using your enemy's equipment against them.

During WW2, simple single-shot pistols called Liberators were dropped to resistance units. The idea was you used the pistol to kill the enemy and take his better weapon.

Something you'll see in the movies is someone cloning a phone sim card, which then allows them to easedrop on the calls and text messages sent by the target. This was done to a Korean actress so her management company could keep track of her.

Your alternate is to set up a 'workshop' to build your spy gear - one of the reasons why you find Q in many of the same countries as James Bond. In one of the Stainless Steel Rat books, a smuggled-in computer board is combined with parts to build a tiny desktop manufacturing rig he then uses to make the gear that he couldn't bring with him.

 

[Wojciehowicz]

I've always enjoyed John Moore's Heroics for Beginners, a fun fantasy book but one that starts off with a booby-trapped ventilation duct.

That reminds me of the Supercharger Crawlway from Grimtooth's Traps. Or you could imagine a sci-fi version of Leaping Wizards, and have the vertical shaft use antigravity to rocket them into orbit.

When you stop to think about it, you don't want to be caught with a bunch of gadgets as you're going through customs - what better way to announce that you're a spy? Especially now when full-body x-rays are being done in airports, how do you hide anything?

You paint a message on your t-shirt using ferrite paint that says "I Hope You're Enjoying the View". Do it the Captain Jack Harkness way.