Well, for me, one of those genres is post-scarcity SF. To my mind it's one of the most difficult to pull off. Scarcity has been a fact of the human condition for more or less ever, and once you remove it you have to figure out what it means to be human aside from that endless parade of want. Before you start chapter one. On top of that, it's damnably hard to fashion a sympathetic protagonist out of someone who has never struggled in the way we struggle in our own lives, to present someone who does not come off as a monster of privilege. My hat is off to those who can manage it, to me it seems a miraculous mid-air twist without a net.

Yet I've been thinking about it constantly, as even this morning the lead news story on the radio are about tens upon tens of thousands of jobs being vanished as a cost-cutting measure for American Airlines, who surely have not lost ten billion dollars in the last ten years due to cargo carrier and flight attendant salaries. As automation, lay offs that land in the job market like shark bites, and industrial obsolescence evaporate whole professions, let alone individual jobs, the idea of a post-work culture seems like something we must address--at least in the first world.

But here's the thing--in most (not all, of course) post-scarcity SF, the fact of post-scarcity is a given. The Culture exists. The question of how we got there might be alluded to or skimmed over in an infodump, but I have so often been left feeling like there's us here, and then SCENE MISSING, SCENE MISSING, transeconomic future humans. Like the opening credits of Enterprise--I see all the steps in the space travel evolution chart, but there's a big gap between the space shuttle and Zefram Cochrane. I am a snake charmer--I can't see how we can get so high, in such spangles, how we can fly with such daring.

I think it's a slightly less murky path in Europe than it is in the US right now. Our powers that be would rather drink cognac on a pile of our bones than even give us health care. The word "socialism" might as well be "Voldemort": it which must not be named. For a whole host of sometimes terrible, sometimes merely stupid, reasons, we are apparently going to argue about abortion, contraception (not actually the same thing!), and gay marriage until we're bartering sex, guns, and stories about how it was before the fall for potatoes and uncontaminated water. It's not even a matter of how might it evolve here, but how might it overcome the tremendous entrenched resistance to the very concept of living comfortably without a wage.

It's not even that there's not enough work for everyone--our infrastructure is falling apart. There's a lot of people in this country who'd be happy to work on a bridge, but nobody wants to pay them for it. There will be no new public works act, and one day most of our bridges and the better part of our electrical system is just going to peace out.

But you know all this.

When Charlie first asked me to post I thought immediately: oooh, I get to ask my question. There is no commentariat more perfect to present it to.

Call it worldbuilding, call it a crystal ball. But what I really want to know is: how do we get there? What's the missing scene? There are a whole mass of possibilities (and I really think most of them are: not developing a post-scarcity culture) and I want to chart some out. Barring aliens landing with manna-dispensing replicators, how do we actually progress, both technologically/economically and as a culture to the point where a job is not the measure of a man? Because the cultural bits are a thorny, thorny business. Pursuing any field without immediately applicable utility seems to be seen as a particularly baroque form of suicide these days, both in the top-level political conversation and online. And all that bootstraps and a hard day's labor will straighten you right out, punk stuff doesn't just evaporate. In a very real sense the truly rich are already living in this world, but that doesn't keep them from telling the rest of us what is and isn't real work (plumbers, I guess. That seems to be a synecdoche for "honest" labor in the current rhetoric) and a real life, doesn't keep them from propping up the idea that yes, in fact, you are your fucking khakis.

I'm a skeptic. The Diamond Age is one of my favorite novels of all time, but I make my living in the folklore mines. That story about the cauldron of plenty that is always full of food or gold or silk or wine and never goes empty? It always ends badly. The cauldron is always a trick, or a trap, or it's real and precious beyond measure and ends up in pieces on some witch's floor.

But I also grew up with Fox Mulder as my moral compass. I want to believe.

So let's play. It's like the opposite of an zombie apocalypse plan. What's your plan for outliving lack?

It's not that I don't have a dog in this race. I am, I know you'll be surprised to hear, a human living in the early 21st century with a vested interest in continuing at least one of those states (human or living in the 21st century--I'm not super picky which). And having just written a time-sprawling posthuman AI novella, it's fairly clear I have thoughts on the subject. It's just that, to belabor a metaphor, your dog is a SuperLabrador with paw-rockets, a tail that can hack wirelessly into the holorabbit whipping around the track, and an honest, loving, loyal cyborg heart. Mine is an old herd-dog, shaggy, dark, beautiful and uncanny, primeval and enormous--and every once in awhile, even though her heart is blood and muscle, she wins as if by magic.

A friend of mine said the other day that he'd surprised himself by starting to write a fantasy novel rather than his beloved SF. He felt it was a story he needed to tell, but also confined by what he saw as the limitations of fantasy: that it is essentially about the past and therefore not concerned with possibility in the same way--in fact, by definition a genre of the impossible. A genre of might-have-been instead of could-someday-be.

I don't think very much of that hierarchy, but you don't get to choose your paradigms. (Much.)

When I told my friend it was silly to think that fantasy must be a medieval RISK-analogue, he asked what, then, was the difference between fantasy and science fiction. I didn't have a satisfying answer, and maybe I still don't. But I have an answer.

There's only a difference where you want one to be.

The famous defense of science fiction is that while taking place in the future or one imaginable future, it is profoundly concerned with the present, taking current trends and understandings of the world and extrapolating forward to a greater or lesser degree. SF always speaks to the time in which it is written.

I have never understood why fantasy is exempt from this. Why is the opposite not taken as equally and unavoidably true? While taking place in the past* or one imaginable past, it is profoundly concerned with the present, taking currents trends and understandings of the world and exaggerating to a greater or lesser degree. Why do I never hear this applied to fantasy? It's not even interesting at this point to say The Lord of the Rings has a great deal to say about WWI. I don't think it's an accident that A Song of Ice and Fire was first published in the aftermath of the Cold War, during a particularly ugly internecine period of struggle in the Balkans, but achieved its greatest popularity in the political climate of post 9/11 America, when fighting a whole bunch of wars all over the world became a reality for many people. Likewise, I suspect the popularity of Lev Grossman's The Magicians series has something to do with the generation of college students graduating into a dark world they believed was good and bright, saddled with debt and joblessness. And you know, it's noticeable that steampunk came into its own during a period when life is starting to look damned Dickensian again, when the split between rich and poor has widened drastically, when the aristocrats with the pretty clothes have moved the child-devouring factories to other continents so that no one has to see them at all. Magical realism tends to spring up in totalitarian regimes--when actual life has become a trickster play, when the government is run by magical thinking and words no longer mean what they say** books start appearing in which the otherworld is encroaching on reality rather than taking place in another reality entirely.

Fantasy is almost always strongly addressing the present and the future.

And while I'm rarely asked about my thoughts on transhumanism, when I write about immortal pre-scarcity beings who structure their whole world around the avoidance of boredom and the cultivation of psychologies which will stand the test of longevity, I'm not just thinking about the world of 1164--or honestly thinking about it much at all. When I write about a sexually-transmitted city, it's not just because it's a cool elevator pitch, but because I live in such a fully networked world, one in which we all go to this third place where we can be ourselves when the work day is over. When I break the fourth wall to address the reader, it's to tell them what I think I know about real life here on Earth. It has never once occurred to me that in writing fantasy I am not writing directly and profoundly about actual life in the present day--and where that present day might lead us. That I am not translating fairy tales about then into fairy tales about now. Folklore is how humans explain the world to themselves. Fairy tales are a vital part how a culture promulgates itself and instructs the young (and old). They have always been about how to behave and survive right here and now. Magic, like technology, merely foregrounds the stranger processes at work.

And if you think we're beyond believing in magic, you've got another thing coming. I can't count the number of times during the 08 crash I heard someone give my unemployed husband and friends the following advice: "Write down the job you want ten /seven/three times on a piece of paper, fold it up and carry it with you/against your skin/with a dollar bill in your left pocket/right pocket all the time." That is a magic spell by any measure. Apple uses the word "magical" to sell the iPad because they know it works, it appeals to us on that folkloric level.

It goes both ways, too. When I read SF, I am always delighted by the old, old magic in it. And the Singularity is such a glittering, magical thing. When I listen to discussions about the Singularity, when I read stories about it, I hear: one day we will all wake up and turn into fairies. One day we'll all go to Fairyland together. White shores and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise. I hear visions of a world whose technology accomplishes the exact actions that magic strove to: transmutation, transmigration, immortality, altering the body, the granting of wishes, the reading of minds. Something out of nothing, lead into gold. A world whose folk dwell in so much plenty and ease that they might as well be fairies, their countries Fairyland. I hear the same longing for these things that I hear when fantasy authors write about dragons and potions and magic from before the dawn of time.

That, and I hear the ghost of Cotton Mather.

Cotton Mather, for those of you who don't know, was a deeply unhappy man who lived in Boston in the late 17th century. I've heard him referred to as New England's first horror writer, and I think that's about right. He was a pastor and an author obsessed with the Rapture to a level that would surprise even Tim LaHaye and his ilk. Both he and his father predicted it would come just about every five years until he died--and in dying he was still waiting for it, bitterly, bitterly disappointed that it had not come in his lifetime. He sparked a Millennialist fever in New England and, rather more famously, was deeply involved in the Salem Witch Trials.

A year or two ago I came across a dialogue between Cotton and his father Increase in which they discussed what parts of the body they would be able to shed after the Rapture, and which they would keep. The genitals could go no problem, of course, and the digestive tract, since eating would be unnecessary. Possibly the liver as well, since what toxins could survive in Paradise? The heart and the brain posed a problem, however--would we need those organs to think and feel or would we become pure persons, identities intact without bodies?

I said aloud: What you mean is when you upload, Cotton, buddy. Will you need to maintain a connection to your physical body or will you be able to upload completely?

The tone of the conversation was exactly the same as the one I hear now--it's not really a joke at all when we call it the Rapture of the Nerds. The same hatred of the body echoed in Cotton and Increase's urgent debate, the same longing to leave all the troublesome processes of physical existence behind, to enter a world where they and their particular abilities would make them saints and kings, and those who mocked them would be useless devils or worse. (Don't think this isn't the very urge behind planning for the zombie apocalypse.) The same assumption that in Paradise, they would be able to affect reality as one would in a VR world, that their highest and purest desires would become manifest. The same desire to witness the end of the world by whatever definition, the same desperation not to miss it, to be the generation that achieved ascension.

Not only New England's first horror writer, but her first science fiction writer.

And to me, it's all one. Not in a flippant way, but deep, primal, unifying. The herd-dog is an uplifted mind. The SuperLab has old, old bones. I do genuinely believe that stories save us. Over and over, narrative tells us how to get through and get beyond, how to be human and how to be inhuman, too, when it comes time to grow. We are, at our cores, narrative beings. And most especially, science fiction and fantasy save us. They tell us who we are, who we can be, who we want to be and who we don't, what we could be and what we can reject if we are strong enough. It says all these things more boldly and yet more secretly than mimetic fiction, which does not often try to speak to the dreams and terrors of a species on the verge.

Ask me about the future and I'll tell you a fairy tale. Ask me about the past and I'll tell you about uploading. We are always writing about ourselves--we can't help it. The difference between a post-human and a fairy, between a dragon and a lobster, is only in the name.

*Obviously, I don't buy the canard that SF is about the future and fantasy is about the past. I think both are about the Other, how we engage with it, refuse to engage, are assimilated or rejected by it. These things don't play for a particular temporal team.

**For more on totalitarian regimes and how language and fiction changes within them I highly recommend Maguerite Feitlowitz's A Lexicon of Terror. For further reading on the desire to shed the body and transform into spirit/energy as a cultural meme throughout more or less the entirety of Western culture from Athens onward, see Peter Brown's superb and eye-opening The Body and Society. For Cotton Mather and his contemporaries' obsession with the end of the world, including the mentioned dialogue, Jame West Davidson's The Logic of Millennial Thought in 18th Century New England is an amazing, wry, and thoughtful read.

It started at 4am last Wednesday, when I left home in Edinburgh; I timed the door-to-door travel time to a hotel in Colorado Springs and it worked out as 24 hours and 6 minutes (with a seven hour time zone change on top). COSine, the local Colorado Springs SF convention was a blast, and I'd like to thank everyone (and in particular, con chair Joe Sokola) for inviting me. Then it all re-started again on Monday, with a 4am start and a couple of flights that ended at La Guardia. I'm now decompressing somewhat, but still rushing around: New York is where a huge chunk of the US publishing business is based, and I'm here because my agent and both my largest publishers are here.

Anyway, because I'm here, I might as well announce that I'm planning on holing up in a pub on Thursday evening: I'll be at The Ginger Man (11 East 36th St, NYC) from 6pm this Thursday 2nd. (No reservation, all welcome. Well, all who read this blog, or my twitter feed, or my Facebook page. I'd rather you didn't try to flashmob the place by inviting random strangers.)

The problem with Russian Cuisine and Me is that I don't like dill and I don't like sour cream. These ingredients are prominent in like 90% of Russian dishes. So I end up altering things a lot, because I want to be able to eat it. I'll eat the cow tongue and the pickled herring and dammit, I'll even have the chicken jello if I get salt and some thick bread to put it on, but the smell of dill turns my stomach and unless it's swirled in borscht, sour cream is just foul.

All of this brings me to Olivier, which is a traditional and much beloved Russian/Ukrainian adaptation of a French dish (far more of Russian cooking is French-derived than you'd think, thanks to pre-Revolution courtly connections with France) often served at holidays. And how you feel about it depends on how you feel about potato salad in general.

I do not like potato salad.

I have no idea if it is a thing that exists in the UK--I never came across it while living there, but then, I would hardly seek it out. Here's how you make a potato salad: get some potatoes, skin them, microwave them, chop them up, dump a jar of mayonnaise into them, and you eat that shit and you like it or you'll hurt your mother's feelings.

Salad Olivier is potato salad's inevitable Pokemon-like evolution into its next stage. Potatortle! In addition to the potato and mayonnaise, you add ham, canned peas and carrots, pickles, diced egg, and yes, dill.

I know it is beloved. I know altering the recipe in any way is basically a crime against humanity, God, and Russia. But ever since I turned it down the first time, I have thought: we have got to be able to do better than this. I am foodie, here me roar! Why would I use all these sad ingredients when I might actually be able to make this into something I can eat without shaming myself in front of the possibly-sentient potato salad?

So here's the thing. Don't serve this to your Russian family members or in-laws. You will never hear the end of how it's not "right." Call it Salad Olivrizard if you must. But for those of us who, like me, cannot handle potato salad on any level, consider this version.

Firstly, why the hell would we ever use gross, quivery store-bought mayonnaise? You make mayonnaise by mixing an egg and some olive oil at high speed. You can add anything you want to this in order to flavor it--I really like to add some rich curry paste or hot peppers and honey, but for Olivrizard, I suggest lemon garlic. Start with 1/4 cup of olive oil and one egg, add...well, I really like garlic so I'd probably add half a head, but you most likely want more like 2-4 cloves, plus the juice of a lemon and about a 1/2 teaspoon of zest--salt and pepper to taste. Whip it up in a food processor and when it's blended, drizzle in another 1/3 cup of olive oil slowly until it emulsifies. Now you have mayonnaise (aioli, really) that is not a tasteless 1970s abomination.

For the ham, substitute pancetta, for it is what bacon hopes to be when it grows up. Again I feel more is better, but chop up enough pancetta (thick chunks) to make about a cup, fry it up and put it aside on a paper towel to cool and drain. Give a piece to your cat to propitiate her, watch while she kicks it around for awhile with her huge paws before gnawing on it; laugh at her.

Get FRESH peas at the market, shell, and blanch. (Blanching means dump them into boiling water for 1 minute, remove and dunk in cold water.) Ditto with carrots. Fresh, peel, chop, and blanch.

If you want diced egg, go ahead and boil up 2 and set aside to cool. If you want to be SUPER FANCY, soak the boiled, peeled eggs in a mixture of soy sauce (2 tblsp), orange juice(1/3 cup), two tea bags of whatever tea you prefer, and cinnamon (two sticks) for 3-4 hours. You'll get deep dark brown beautiful eggs lightly flavored with tea and citrus and cinnamon and salt. I have an unfair advantage here with my chickens, because honestly, fresh chicken eggs are kind of unbeatable in that they possess actual chicken flavor. But not everyone has an ornery pack of hens out back.

Now, for pickles, I make my own. I do not suggest that this is necessary. In fact, the pickle part is kind of unnecessary, even in the classic dish, where it's optional. If you want to make malosolne ogurski, though, which means not-much-salt pickles, go ahead and slice up some pickling cukes, boil 1.5 liters of water with 2.5 tablespoons of salt and once the brine is cooled, pour it into glass jars containing cucumbers, 2 crushed cloves of garlic, a teaspoon of mustard seeds, 1/2 teaspoon of fresh horseradish, a sprig of cilantro (or dill or parsley if you hate cilantro), a sprig of thyme, and a couple of white peppercorns. Seal and wait 3 days. Then you have amazing crisp pickles with a totally unique taste, as there's no vinegar in this recipe.

Once you have all these ready, peel and boil about 2 pounds of potatoes, dice them into little cubes once cool--make sure all ingredients are cool or things will curdle and half cook and get gross really fast--and mix everything together in a big bowl along with a whole medium diced red onion. Add salt and black pepper as you will.

This is what happened with me and borscht, too. I figured I could awesome it up some--and my borscht is famous in my social group, but my in-laws assure me it's not "really" borscht. So if you're willing to suffer the shame of it not "really" being Olivier, you can join me in defeating the gelatinous potato salad incursion into our universe with the blinding light of justice, pork, and garlic.

How would you go about faking your own death?

Like any good story, there have to be some restrictions, of course.

1. You must appear to die in front of witnesses. No simply sending a mass email from a fake account. The method of death, however, is up to you. You must appear credibly dead for at least a brief period of time.

2. You cannot use anything or anyone you do not actually have access to in your real life. If you don't know someone who is amazing at Hollywood-level makeup and could keep your secret, or aren't besties with a coroner, you can't manifest them out of thin air for this scenario. (If you do, however, knock yourself out.)

Oddly enough, this has come up in my family. The minute I mentioned that I was thinking of asking Charlie's commenters to fake their own deaths, my husband said: Oh, we kind of had to do that back in Russia! He may actually be the child of some kind of Soviet superhero breeding program, given how often he busts out these kinds of stories.

Turns out, in order to immigrate to the United States, Dmitri's father, despite being in his 40s, had to secure either his father's permission or his father's death certificate. They did not have either. Why? Because apparently, "his father's disappearance was a mystery." I'm quoting directly so you will know how very like the beginning of a Holmes story this sounded.

Thus, the family had to bureaucratically fake a death which none of them could be sure had actually occurred and produce a death certificate out of nothing.

Obviously, I'm asking you for a slightly tougher task, with a pesky body to swap or mangle or vanish. But do consider to whom you will be faking your death: who in your life would have to believe you are beyond this mortal coil in order for you to be effectively deceased? Who would keep your secret? This is where the too hard/too easy thing comes in. People are really more likely to believe anything they're told or see that's remotely plausible, I think, than kids in murder mystery shows. But at the same time, if a death is too flashy, in the real world there's usually an investigation, which would sink you unless you were very good.

But I have faith in you! The game is afoot!

Edit: Please be as elaborate as possible--that's part of the fun. Also, no more boating scenarios, we're full up. And as the conversation has evolved, feel free consider how one lives in the world post-death.

For those of you (which I suspect is most of you) who don't know who I am, I present a few Facts before I get into the technofuture thoughttery.

I'm mostly a fantasy writer. But I've branched out into science fiction in the last couple of years. I dig folklore all the way and a lot of what I write deals with that, even the SF, because we don't just stop telling stories to explain ourselves to ourselves when we have shinier tech. A lot of what I write features what gets variously called "rich language" "lyrical prose" or "I couldn't follow it, can't she use fewer/easier words?"

I write a lot of books for adults and have a pretty successful middle grade series going. I've done some time editing but it didn't agree with me. I write fast--I teach seminars on how to write a book in 30 days. I've won some awards, lost several, and I've been at the gig since 2004, full-time since 2006. I blog myself over on Livejournal.

I live on an island off the coast of Maine, which is both more and less isolating than you'd think. I live in a village of a few hundred people, a lot of us grow, raise, and/or fish a fair portion of our own food, and connected through a listserv, we have a unique internal economy wherein we barter for goods and services. Once an object has been brought across the bay, it is such a pain in the ass to take it back that it tends to stay on the island for more or less centuries, traded from hand to hand, sometimes bought with money, but mostly not. This includes your physical body: we have three large graveyards on an island slightly less than two miles long. But we are part of the city of Portland, only two miles offshore, and have regular ferry service.

I have two dogs (Golden Retriever and German Shepherd), two cats (Maine Coon and Stray Extremely Ill-Tempered Tabby Who Came Home from the Park with My Husband Eleven Years Ago and Will Obviously Live Forever Fueled by Her Hatred of the Universe) and six laying hens (I present their names as they probably tell you more about me than this whole post: Pertelote, Billina, Black Chocobo, Dinosaur, Ziggy Stardust and Nanny Ogg). Little known fact: my Maine Coon has a full sister and half brother owned by awesome author Seanan McGuire.

If the Maine thing didn't make it clear, I'm American--I thought I'd throw that out up front since this is a European blog and I'm, well, not. I will necessarily have a slightly different political perspective. Many of you have governments that will take care of you when you're sick! Mine would rather let me rot, most especially since I am a self-employed writer. Good times. However, I actually lived in Edinburgh, a city relevant to this blog, and went to university there (since I know you're all internet research hounds, I'll explain: I went as an exchange student? But then it turned out no one in the history of the program had ever gone in my major--Classics--and few enough in their senior year, so they sat me down and were all: "Yeah, you're going to need to take and pass the full degree exams for both Greek and Latin or you can't graduate from your American university either." And kids, those are no joke. Especially when they only tell you that two weeks before the exam. So by god I feel it's legit to say I went to university at Edinburgh, though my diploma says University of California.) so we needn't discuss cookies vs biscuits or lift vs elevator or any of that. I also lived in Japan for a couple of years when I was first publishing.

Aside from writing I'm an Italian-American woman with no kids, so naturally I cook like a fiend. I'll definitely be sharing some recipes. I'm also an avid knitter, I make pickles (because I married a Russian man and homemade pickles are love-in-a-jar for him) and jams, I sail and blow glass and I am trying to learn the accordion but damn, it is not the easiest instrument I could have chosen to pick up. Other than sailing, which I was raised with as both my parents were sailors, I picked up most of these hobbies when, like Charlie, my hobby became my day job and I suddenly needed something else to do as a hobby.

Part of the reason Charlie asked me to come over here and natter for a month because I posted about his recent series of future/worldbuilding posts a few weeks ago. Basically, he kind of freaked me out. That Stross, he is a convincing guy when he talks about the future!

The kind of science fiction I write is not as concerned with the near future. I take a folkloric approach to SF--these are the stories we are telling ourselves right now about our own nature, this is how we explain the world to ourselves. I like to take those stories apart and put them back together in strange shapes. I think in every meaningful way we are living in "the future" of the 50s, of which flying cars were never the central feature. I am thirty-two years old--I remember life before the internet, but I was a child. My adult life has been characterized by radical technological and political change I, as a classicist who did not even have an email address until she was twenty, could not have begun to predict. (Ok, not true, classicists are really good at predicting politics. It's the tech that stumbles us. I could have predicted my 8 bit games turning into Skyrim, but not that a glorified classmates.com would take over the technological world.) Now that the internet has settled into being a massive an integral part of our lives on Planet Earth, we are starting to see how it changes our culture in the medium to long term, how profoundly it skews even comparatively young predictions of 15 years ago. The internet is not a Singularity with a capital S, but it is a sea change sharing more in common with the Industrial Revolution than simply a new device.

One of the problems that is leading to some of the more dire issues Charlie brings up is memory. Not personal memory (at least not per se) or senescence, but generational and cultural memory. No one is now living who can remember the Industrial Revolution, so the West draws very few lessons from that, so few that we just assume the world created by that Revolution is the one we'll be living in in perpetuity. We think technological advancement means new toys, not new worlds. I lived in Ohio for awhile, part of what is sort of affectionately called the Rust Belt in the United States. It used to be called the Steel Belt. It was where great swathes of American manufacturing, particularly automotive manufacturing, took place. Towns thrived on their auto plants, tire plants, steel mills, came into being purely to fill jobs at those facilities. With only a few exceptions, those plants have been shut for decades now. Some shut down in the 80s, some shut down in the 70s. Yet if you talk to older folk in those once-booming towns, most will tell you that one day the industry will come back. The politicians will make it happen, or somehow they will make their town attractive enough again that magically a steel mill will appear with a big red bow on it. Some of the younger generation knows it isn't so--but only some.

Because industrial boom is normal, right? The way of life that worked for exactly one generation--the Boomers--will work for everyone from now on. Any bust or crisis is a blip, a deviation which will, which must, correct itself. Because culturally we have about two generations worth of memory, maybe three, and then the black curtain comes down and we can't imagine that life in a 20th century first world nation is itself the aberration in human experience. What do you mean you can't afford a house by the time you're 30? What do you mean there are no good entry level positions? You're just not trying hard enough. The steel mills will come back, you'll see.

Will the internet go the way of the steel mill? I don't know, maybe. We still use steel, but the way we make it, buy it, and sell it has changed profoundly and cannot change back. (Nothing changes back, only forward. I suppose this is a relevant lesson for publishing, really. Radical change is the new black.) Certainly the current state of the internet, which is itself changed pretty radically from just five or six years ago, will change enormously, no matter how many articles I read on the permanence of Facebook. (See what I mean about memory? They said MySpace was permanent, too, and that was hardly a generation ago. I remember thinking Livejournal would go on forever.) Facebook changed the culture of online interaction and it can't change back, but it will certainly be replaced by something else--the question is only how it will be changed. By government intvervention, SOPA 2: Beyond Thunderdome, by independent companies innovating or by enormous corporations cannibalizing each other. Probably all of those. I can't imagine the internet going away entirely, I don't think you can put that massive networked genie back in the bottle--but I suppose that's the point. I live in a company town. It's inconceivable right now that the company won't always be around.

I think everyone is kind of freaked out right now. Which is why they set up tents on the street last year. Why some are still there. We're freaked because we don't know what's coming--but we're reasonably sure it's going to be shitty. Dystopia is the thing to write about these days. We have more faith in dystopia than utopia. SF used to be all about utopia, Starfleet and replicators and living forever. To be honest, Brave New World seems kind of cute to me these days. At least the oppressive government thought to hand out Soma so trod-upon people wouldn't be so goddamn miserable! Our governments just say: suck it up, epsilon assholes. Might as well be stamped on our coins.

It's tough to say everything's going to be ok. Living at the end of one way of life and the beginning of another sucks. Most people just want to be fat and happy and do some meaningful work, have kids, and die. Except for dying, the ability to do all of that is up in the air these days. And that's where we are. Industrial life is in its death throes and it isn't pretty or fair. Daddy Tolkien will tell us it was no treat living in the just-post Industrial Revolution, either. After all, we all know our history: what follows Revolutions? Usually, Terror.

That's why, I think, there's been a small but concerted effort to "bring back" optimistic SF in the last few years. We're looking for ways to know it'll all work out without mass extinction or widespread horror. The trouble is that massive technological change is not optimistic for some people, it's frightening. Terrifying. And not just mainstream "mundanes," or else what is the recent newfound love of the 19th century all about? What else has driven half my generation back to spinning wheels, knitting needles, preserving jars, and livestock? Everything is uncertain--let's go back and pretend it's still possible to live in the Shire. I'm guilty of it, too, obviously.

And I guess the whole point of writing future-oriented SF is to show one possible way it could all work out. Even if that involves dystopia. In some sense, big S Singularity is such an easy answer to that. An escape hatch--we'll all uplift, upload, and upend everything, and sort of skip the problems at the end of this chapter. SF writers don't get to call the shots, but we are meant to show the way.

Of course, once we get there, memory will fade and we'll forget it was any other way.

Of course, it's not going to be like that.

I have, in general, very little time for Donald Rumsfeld; but he's very occasionally right about something, and in February 2002, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, he made a rather remarkable speech for a contemporary politician; one in which he attempted to distinguish between categories of uncertainty:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — there are things we do not know we don't know.

Start with a horizon 10 years out:

85% known knowns

10% known unknowns

5% unknown unknowns

For every additional decade, knock 7% off the "known knowns" column and add 5% to "known unknowns" and 2% to "unknown unknowns". Very approximately. Warning: warranty expires when "known knowns" drops below 67%, i.e. around 2052 if we do this exercise right now (in 2012).

The devil, of course, is in the details.

Let's take a simple example: cellphones. We know what the state of the art is right now. We also know roughly what ARM and Intel are planning for the next 2-3 years. We know that mature segments of the consumer electronics market tend to split between a major incumbent with 80%, a minor incumbent with 10-15%, and a bunch of also-rans. (This happens in other market sectors. For many years the automobile sector in the USA split roughly 80:15 between regular cars and pick-up trucks. It's now been disrupted with the arrival of SUVs, blurring the car/pick-up boundary, but we're in a time of change anyway as electronics also impact automobiles.) We can expect smartphones to therefore settle into an 80/15/5 split over the next decade, with a major incumbent (say, Android—on present form), a minor "different" incumbent (iOS—although the place I've assigned to Android may end up with Apple, and vice versa), and also-rans. Which incumbent ends up where is therefore a known unknown.

The "unknown unknown" for phones over the next decade is that a Carrington event wipes out all our high-tech infrastructure and we starve, or maybe a sudden breakthrough gives us pseudo-instantaneous quantum entanglement instead of radio, or Windows 9 Mobile takes the world by rapturous storm and the Apple Taliban ditch their iphones and switch to Windows with shrieks of glee.

(I ought to add a fourth category of unknown called the "implausible unknown" — developments not compatible with the laws of nature as currently understood, or overturning major scientific paradigms. Tachyons, alien invaders, or telepathy all fall into this basket, and if you dumpster-dive it for ideas in fiction you are, at best, writing science fantasy.)

Again, two other "unknown unknowns" bit SF authors in previous decades. Prior to 1980 the portrayal of personal computing devices in SF was noticeable by its absence. There were a couple of books and stories that had them, but by and large they were invisible. On the other hand, prior to 1990 virtually all SF set in the near to distant future presupposed that manned space travel was going to be relatively easy and commonplace: a picture that doesn't look anything like as inevitable today.

Two important aspects of the unknown/known unknowns approach are that the further into the future we peer, the more the unknown unknowns stack up; and also, as new evidence comes to light, stuff may need to be shuffled between columns.

The first point should be obvious. To anyone writing an SF novel prior to 1987, it seemed perfectly obvious that the USSR was stable in the medium to long term. Boy did we get sandbagged by that one! And now, with 20/20 hindsight, the signs are obvious that dictatorial systems in general are unstable once the dictators are not hereditary monarchs with an incentive to pass a working system on to their children and a broad base of popular support. During the 1990s and early 00s, with very little fuss outside the continent in question, South America transformed from a continent dominated by quasi-fascist dictatorships to an almost complete sweep of democracies. In 2011, the Arab world erupted in democracy demonstrations and revolutions. The short-term process of the Arab Spring is still playing out: but one long-term consequence is clear—any diplomat who bases their foreign policy assumption on the "known known" that "the Arab street doesn't care about democracy" is sticking their head in the sand.

So in consequence of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR, the South American transition, and the Arab Spring, I think it's reasonable to move "democratic revolutions in dictatorships" from the unknown-unknown column (where it resided in 1984) to the known-unknown column (we know it's going to happen; the only questions are where and when).

Another principle of near-future world-building is that human civilizations are fractal. That is: all human cultures have in common the fact that they are organizations of humans. In the absence of a major change in the nature of humanity (which falls under the heading of "unknown unknowns"— we can't rule out strongly superhuman AI or intelligence augmentation, but we don't know when it's going to happen or even if it is going to happen) we have the same Lego bricks to build civilizations with, so certain design patterns keep recurring. Moreover, the bricks decay (they die of old age; and their bureaucratic institutions—an attempt to build patterns that outlive the decay of individual bricks—succumb to capture by special interests or outlive their societal context). Knowledge is lost, and in the absence of knowledge gained by personal experience, the same damn mistakes keep being repeated over a time scale approximating a human lifespan.

We live longer these days, but I would feel fairly confident, in an SF novel that posits no breakthroughs in intelligence amplification or longevity, and no huge rupture in the way we allocate resources, of predicting some sort of major economic collapse/disruption circa 2090-2110. Because those of us who lived through and understood the ongoing crisis since 2008 will be dead of old age by then, and bright young things who've never even heard of the Great Depression, much less the Long Depression of 1873-96, will assume nothing like the horror of 2007-2015 can happen to them. Recurrent depressions are a known-unknown corollary of industrial capitalism. An unknown-unknown would be a singularity event in which vastly intelligent, benevolent entities give us everything we want for the asking, or in which we live 200-600 years (so those of us who remember the last depression are in a position to prevent the next one), or someone comes up with a virus that modifies the way we think, making New Soviet Man a reality. Or something else that breaks the self-similar patterning of industrial capitalism so that the Penrose tiles human societies are built from are replaced by new patterns.

So, to summarize: we have a complex mess of human societies that are, nevertheless, full of recurring non-identical variations on a core theme, because the common object the societies are all built out of are human beings. Barring changes in the nature of human beings, we can therefore expect chunks of history to be built out of the same components. We also have a future where, the further out we probe, the more unknown unknowns we run into; but in the short term, the main factors that shape what the world looks like are familiar. We can expect the world of 2022 to look similar to the world of 2012, insofar as many of the same cars will still be on the roads, fashion continues to iterate around a bunch of attractor themes scattered over the past century, many of today's large corporations will still exist (although some will have collapsed), and so on. There will be some surprises (maybe there'll be a hotel in space, or a Chinese Moon base) but overall it will be recognizable. But by the time we push the boat out to 2032, the unknown-unknowns will be building up. Signs of climate stress and overpopulation will be more visible, we may have driverless cars, there may be major disruptive effects arising from the development of direct brain interfaces or something else that today is a research and development curiosity. And by 2052, the unknown unknowns will have driven the world to be a very different place from anything I can predict today.

While I'm on the road, blogging will be very erratic. So I'm handing over the soap box this time to award-winning and wildly innovative fantasy novelist Cat Valente. Here's her potted author bio:

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan's Tales series, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.

As you might have noticed, the British public unintentionally elected a rather weird pantomime horse coalition government nearly two years ago. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Conservatives vowed to reduce the national deficit — the ratio of tax income to expenditure — in order to reduce the government's level of borrowing. There's more than one way to do this: you can raise tax levels, cut expenditure, or cut tax and increase expenditure selectively to encourage economic growth (and thus increase tax receipts in the long term). The government decided to rely overwhelmingly on just one lever, however: spending cuts.

When the budget is cut, hard choices are made. Do you cut healthcare spending, or essential provision for the severely disabled (and those unable to work because there are no jobs to go round)? Or do you cut fripperies, such as the maintenance budget for public parks or libraries?

As in several other countries, here in the UK we have a thing called the Public Lending Right. PLR is a small pot of cash distributed annually to authors who have registered books that are loaned out via British libraries. This is compensation for sales lost to library loans. It's not a huge pot, and the disbursement is relatively small: it was 6.29 pence (£0.0629) per loan prior to February 2010, and there was a ceiling on payouts — both Terry Pratchett and J. J. Rowling stood to take home no more than £6600 each. To put it in perspective, the royalty an author receives for the sale of a £7.99 paperback is on the order of 60p, or the equivalent of ten loans under the scheme.

Since the Coalition were elected, PLR payments have been cut, modestly: to 6.25p in February 2011, and 6.05p in February 2012. Not too onerous for a round of public belt-tightening ... but it's only a cut of 5% or so over two years, right?

Which is why I am extremely worried to report that my payment has fallen from £1,956.21p in February 2011 to £1,371.39p in February 2012.

I registered two additional titles in 2011, thus increasing my number of titles eligible for loans by around 10%. And my publishers' sales figures don't show my sales to the public falling significantly. (The picture is muddied by the recession and the implosion of Borders in the USA, but I haven't suddenly fallen into the memory hole.)

After taking into account the fact that payments are made at 96.8% of the level in 2012 as in 2011, this corresponds to a drop in library loans of 27.6% in one year — probably more, taking into account the new titles.

I'm not worried because of a cut to my income: rather, I'm worried about the big picture. Libraries are substantially but not exclusively used by children, the unemployed, and pensioners: mostly people without the discretionary spending power to shrug and go to a bookshop instead.

And note the first group I mentioned. I'm not a children/young adult author, but if the drop in my PLR loans reflects library closures, then we have just slammed the door in the face of a new generation of readers. I got my start reading fiction from my local library; the voracious reading habits of a bookish child aren't easily supported from a family budget under strain from elsewhere during a time of cuts. I hate to think what the long term outcome of this short-term policy is going to be, but I don't believe any good will come of it.

But this is not an American blog, I don't get to vote in those elections (not being American), and meddling in other folks' internal politics is rarely sensible. So I'm simply going to note my sympathy for the strikers at this point, and suggest that if you're American and don't want your internet future to be dominated by centralized media entities stamping down on anything resembling satire or remix culture or independent thought, you might want to learn about SOPA and get campaigning.

Ahem.

Meanwhile, in France, where President Sarkozy's government passed the draconian HADOPI anti-downloading law a couple of years back, it appears that the Elysee Palace is a hive of law-breaking online pirates ...

(PS: Many of the links in this blog entry will fail if you click on them on January 18th, the day of the anti-SOPA internet strike. They should be back by the 19th.)

Long term economic consequences of the demographic transition are still unclear, but we can be fairly sure that post-DT societies need new models for nursing the elderly (you can't simply shuffle them off to a back room and split the work load among five or six daughters). There may be cyclic deflationary pressures (as populations shrink, real estate becomes less valuable), age-induced recessions (as the ratio of workers to [mostly elderly] dependents in a society skews towards the elderly), and so on. The medical care costs of the elderly are higher, but in turn, care for the old is labour intensive (and may offer some hope for how we find jobs for the employable people who've been shoved out of work in agriculture and industry by automation). There's also some indication that the demographic transition is semi-reversible, with some countries that went into steep sub-replacement decline suddenly experiencing baby booms (notably France and the UK in the past decade).

More controversial is the interaction between future shock, the demographic transition and religious indoctrination.

One response to the rapid pace of technological and social change is what Alvin Toffler characterised in 1970 as future shock: a syndrome characterised by inability or refusal to adapt to change, rejection of new patterns of social organization, vehement adoption of superstitious, new age or fundamentalist religious beliefs, and social reaction. We can see the symptoms of future shock all around us today. Among the reactions to change are a rise in extreme fundamentalism, and also (in societies undergoing or just having undergone the demographic transition) the use of religious justifications to restrict womens' reproductive freedom. (Males with social privilege are threatened directly by female emancipation, especially in traditional societies where large family size is a status/wealth symbol. It's also a direct threat to male sexual privilege in developed nations).

Restrictions on female reproductive autonomy also serve to induce women to remain within a faith community by making it hard to leave, which in turn ensures that their children are raised within that particular memetic complex. The War On Women's Reproductive Freedom is probably best seen as an adaptive backlash against the background of rapid change, but I think it's doomed to fail in the long term because forces driving the demographic transition (notably the increasing cost of raising a child to adulthood, combined with the decreased rate of infant mortality) aren't going to go away; the ultra-religious are going to end up having to choose between smaller families or living in ever more abject poverty. (Even trying to evade the pressure by home-schooling is problematic, because it's going to be the women who deliver the schooling, which in turn means that the women are going to have to be literate ...)

Keeping on the subject of emancipation: the long-term trends are running in favour of female education and emancipation, and against discrimination on the basis of spurious assumed genetic grounds (classical 19th century European racism). I'm not proposing that bigotry in general is in decline because there are startling blind spots all over the place, and crazy-sounding shit so wild I couldn't put it in a work of fiction. (Bigotry is fractal, and today's victim is tomorrow's oppressor.) I do think that homosexuality is slowly but surely being mainstreamed in western culture, despite opposition from threatened masculinists (and conservative women who see female homosexuality as threatening to undermine their status or lifestyle choices).

Speaking of supernormal sexual stimuli, Peter Watts has speculated that just as Photoshop retouching has corrupted our idea of beauty sufficiently good VR or teledildonics may offer us sexual experiences via machine that are so much better than person-to-person real world sex that, well, nobody wants to make the nasty any more. I'm not sure it's going to go that far, any more than pervasive access to porn on the internet has debauched and depraved our entire society in the past decade or so, but some subcultures/sexualities are unlikely to be mainstreamed because they are frankly harmful to third parties. It is interesting to speculate that teledildonics or VR may not only offer a distracting supernormal sexual stimulus to us, but be tailored to channel individuals with paedophile, necrophile, or other societally unacceptable desires into a non-harmful direction. Or at least in a direction that doesn't harm human beings. (Currently child pornography is illegal because it is argued that paedophiles use it for grooming children by convincing them that it's normal. But what if the child pornography in question could give a paedophile a more fulfilling sexual experience than anything they could experience with a real child, and could not be used for grooming?)

Ahem. Getting back to the long-term consequences of the demographic transition, what is clear is that a population that is around 30-50 years past the transition has a lot more middle-aged or elderly folks than children, with various psychological effects. Past 95, very few surviving adults are physically active. Past 85, many adults are suffering from some degree of dementia (be it vascular dementia or Alzheimer's). Past 45, a low speed cognitive decline begins to set in among many people. Past about 40, we become less flexible and find it harder to adapt to new technologies and ways of thinking, or to learn. And past about 25, we acquire a sense of our own mortality (one reason why, in traditional mass conscription armies prior to the First World War, troops aged 18-24 were assigned to front line units and reserves aged 24-34 were assigned to garrison duty/reserve operations: it wasn't just their physical stamina that was in question, but their willingness to take risks).

Given the rising proportion of elderly people in our societies, I expect that over the next century a lot of medical research will focus on the cognitive defects associated with age. I expect the most debilitating ones to receive most of the research funding -- notably the dementia problem, and to a lesser extent middle-aged cognitive impairment.

Now, it's almost a cliche that the older people get, the more socially conservative/reactionary they become, relative to the baseline social beliefs of young adults. But right now it's hard to tell whether this is a consequence of slow neurodegenerative conditions or of social conditioning — by age 40-50 adults conforming to the majority definition of social success will have raised children and owned property and hopefully started a pension fund; they have a stake in society, and a lot to lose in event of adverse change. Also, with more fragile health, they are generally more risk-averse than youngsters. In the USA it's very rare to see a start-up company founded by anyone over the age of 35; family and health pressures are a huge deterrent against striking out in a new venture without employer-provided group health insurance. (In the UK, start-up founders are frequently older or middle-aged, because a socialised healthcare system removes this major barrier to entrepreneurial ventures.)

I'll note that one side-effect of mild cognitive impairment is a reduction in curiousity. Another is that the person in question tends to assimilate new information only insofar as it validates and supports their existing world-view and prejudices. Beliefs people hold by the time they reach middle age often become set in stone as they grow older. And if more people live into old age, we will see a society in which social change becomes harder to achieve. (Unless medical treatments for cognitive degeneration become available.)

We will probably see by 2032 (much less 2092) middle-aged or elderly adults who are healthier and more cognitively flexible than their counterparts in 2012. The definition of "middle age" is pushed back somewhat; the threshold for "elderly" may likewise be moved. If it turns out that much of the post-35 cognitive change is degenerative and can be treated medically then we may see much livelier middle-aged and elderly people with more flexible, changeable, tolerant attitudes (albeit still more cautious than the young because they've lived through hard times and expect them to come again). Intolerance and authoritarianism seem to be largely an emergent side-effect of abuse and deprivation — a response to existential fear. A post-demographic transition population where child-rearing efforts are focussed on a small number of children and women are educated will (I hope) result in adults who are less prone to fear and intolerance.

If we get life prolongation treatments that work — even if they only prolong our active lives towards the current limit threshold (of roughly 120 years) — then we can expect some more interesting social changes.

For one thing, the primary benefit of democracy over autocracy (that it provides a pressure valve by facilitating orderly transitions of power before any government can become unpopular enough to trigger a mass revolt) may evaporate if the working life of a political professional stretches from age 30 to 120: with the same faces repeatedly coming up from decade to decade there may be an emergent gerontocracy. Jobs with responsibility are going to be hard for youngsters to find, career progression will be slow, and the ability of the elderly to make long-term plans is going to be socially exclusionary towards the young — not a good recipe for avoiding inter-generational strife. Policing of youthful behaviour may become a major social flash-point, with ubiquitous surveillance deployed to produce a global panopticon that suppresses behaviour the elderly find alarming (such as anything remotely high spirited in a public place). The world of 2092 will not be a pleasant place for the under-45s, if this is the state of the medical art.

On the other hand, if we get a handle on the senescence process itself and can either freeze or roll back the physical ageing process and treat the cognitive debilitation of age, then things may take a different (and to our eyes more surreal) turn. Physically young and mentally agile/flexible elderly people will be hard for youngsters to compete with, but will look similar — aside from different choices of style markers. And the cult of youth in 20th/21st century western civilisation will give the elderly youth an incentive to adopt youthful fashions, or to apply the brakes to the rate of change of fashion (however, my money is on the former). It's going to be hard to tell at a glance (without resorting to reality augmentation tech) whether the apparently 22 year old hipster in the bar is a real 22-yo hipster adopting an ironic pose because they're poor and locked in a dead-end part time job for the next 20 years before there's any hope of their obvious merit being recognised, or whether they're an 82 year old whose cynicism is born of genuinely having seen it all before.

Work is going to be a headache. We're already in a situation where, in most of the developed world, the full employment rate is in the range 25%-40% — that is, the proportion of people in the population at large who are employed full-time in a job that they are not over-qualified for. (Remember: a large chunk are under or over employable age, or unemployed, or employed part-time, or in the position of a law graduate working a counter in Walmart. The full employment rate is thus a better indicator of an economy's health than the unemployment rate — because below 4% unemployment there isn't actually enough liquidity in the labour market, and in any case, you can reduce unemployment easily by mandating a lower limit on weekly working hours, thus necessitating more employees to cover a job for 168 hours per week.)

There's an ideological road-block to survival here, and it is current generation capitalism (not to mention the Calvinist work ethic and a whole bunch of quasi-religious baggage). The truth is that we can't all work, and there isn't enough work to go round. Basing our social values on our fiscal utility is both short-sighted and inhumane. It's also horrifyingly oppressive, if you are 20 years old and looking forward to a century of labour at the bottom rungs on the ladder, or poverty. We're currently getting a crash course in what Karl Marx called the crisis of capitalism — its tendency to oscillate between boom and bust. Old, cautious, frightened people don't like busts. So unless they're deprived of effective political redress via the ballot box, they're going to vote for socialisation of risk. It's going to take another generation for the memory of the down-side of the Soviet Bloc to fade, but thereafter we may well see the pendulum swing back towards state planning and provision of universal services such as healthcare, a basic income, and education. Assuming, that is, that the highly acidic melting pot of capital globalisation doesn't dissolve the states before the mass movement of manufacturing capital from the developed to the developing world slows down and equilibrates.

So:

In the short term lots more religious fundamentalism, coupled with an anti-feminist backlash (and racist "get off my lawn" ranting against foreigners taking our jobs, either by coming over here to work or by our corporations sending their factories overseas). Also, lots of Bad Crazy stuff. The USA will be particularly bad, as empires in retreat are always fecund breeding grounds for paranoia, anger, and strange religious heresies. This will die down slowly, as the fundamentalists run into the demographic transition and the wealth-or-fecundity trap, and the imbalance between the wealth of the developed world and the third world diminishes (due to a combination of capital flight on one hand and industrialization on the other).

Other factors will tend to support female emancipation and societal normalization of homosexuality. For example, in China sex-selective abortion has led to a skewed gender ratio, with 1.2 males per female in some areas. The result, however, is that young women contemplating marriage can demand that suitors provide them with wealth such as a house and a car; the social status of young women is indirectly boosted by the dearth of competition, and new families are actively seeking to have daughters. Meanwhile, the first Gay Pride event in Beijing passed peacefully last year, and it's reasonable to predict that social acceptance of homosexuality will in turn reduce the pressure on gay men to marry a beard. Extrapolate to the rest of the world: as countries develop, family sizes shrink, women acquire more education, we see a familiar pattern emerging.

Longer term, we can expect a more cautious societal background, with slower change. More dispossessed youth feeling put-upon by their long-lived elders (as is particularly notable in Greece and Italy. Politics may well slowly swing back towards a pattern of state provision of social services by mid-century; the alternative will be serious civil disorder as the surplus labour left high and dry by the receding tide of automated industrial production revolts.

Huge turd-in-the-punchbowl events that may Change Everything include: working, affordable life extension, a Singularity (i.e. the Rapture of the Nerds, as envisaged circa 1990), mind uploading or working human equivalent AI, a new religion or ideological complex with the growth dynamic of 6th/7th century Islam or 20th century Leninism, and a global epidemic of Martian Hyper-Scabies. But I'd pencil in all of the above as speculative, rather than something that can be counted on.

Any thoughts?

In 2008, at the height of my game, my life was derailed by long-anticipated but unwelcome heart surgery. The publishing gap this left has hurt me dearly, but finally it's here--the novel I wrote in the long and painful recovery period after they opened me up. I'm kinda nervous about this one, and hopeful, and eager to get back on the horse after nearly three years.

I'll leave you with a brief excerpt from a letter, addressed to Antaea Argyre, and sent by history tutor Leal Hieronyma Maspeth:

"I believe something has awakened in one of the cold abandoned places of the world. It is picking off the weak and those who get separated from the group and it is growing bolder.

If you make inquiries no one will admit to anything, so don't even try! I know I'm asking a lot, but you must trust me. We need someone who has experience with this world's mysteries, Antaea.

We need a hunter."

The rest, you'll be able to see for yourselves, after February 14.

I always find these fascinating, because Chairman Bruce is the pre-eminent thought leader of modern near-future SF.

Anyway.

I'm going to use some of his mojo as a jumping off point for asking: what is the world going to look like in 2032? And in 2092?

It's an important question. I expect to be around in 2032, albeit somewhat more creaky (I'll be 68) — the state of the world in 2032 is a matter of personal interest. By 2092 ... well, if I'm still alive in 2092 there will have been medical breakthroughs, because I'd be 128 years old, and that exceeds the current boundary with which human life expectancy converges (which is roughly 121-122). My grandfather died a couple of months short of his 70th birthday; my father is still going strong at 87: a straight line extrapolation would peg me at making it past 104, although I don't think I'm as healthy as dad. So it's a matter of rather more theoretical interest to me, but nevertheless worth worrying about just in case the next 20-80 years bring us some massive breakthroughs in life prolongation.

What do I predict for 2032?

Climate: the current remaining question marks over climate change will have been answered, and the answers won't be anything pleasant. Climate change denialism will probably be about as respectable as Lysenkoism is today — an intellectually corrupt pseudo-science emerging at the behest of a bankrupt ideology. Chunks of the world will be suffering heat stress with damaging effects on agriculture (notably Australia, where imported European-style agricultural practices are really not compatible with the local rainfall patterns and soil, but also chunks of North America, Africa, and the Mediterranean basin: China's rice basket will also take a battering). The main impact will be felt by poor communities (with inadequate shelter from increasingly violent storms) and coastal communities (Bangladesh will take a hammering).

Energy: oil will still be available and planes will still be burning it. Prior to Fukushima I was predicting a big renaissance in nuclear power. Now ... I'm still predicting it, but I think it'll take an extra 10-20 years and people are going to be a lot more cautious. Chernobyl could be written off as Soviet mis-management, but Fukushima, while a lot better managed and less damaging, is in some ways more alarming because it underscores the need to design nuclear plant to be fail-safe even in the face of a once-per-thousand-years event. Which drives the cost of nuclear right up from an already high baseline.

Solar is getting cheaper rapidly, and is now actually rolling out in significant quantities, but runs into the "how do you store it?" problem. What I think we may see is solar plant that, rather than producing electricity, is designed to produce electrons and use them immediately to electrolytically split water, liberating hydrogen, which can then be converted into something more storable ... like methane (using atmospheric CO2 as a carbon source).

Coal is going to get deeply unfashionable. It'll still be with us in 2032, but with expensive scrubbers and carbon capture plant and, more likely, subterranean gasification. Which is still fossil fuel, but is less obvious to the naked eye from the spoil heaps.

Fusion will be 30 years away. But by that, I mean commercial fusion reactors. There will be a prototype under construction, with a turbine hall that will deliver base load to someone's grid (probably France's), when it's running. Which won't be most of the time, because it'll be a prototype and a hangar queen. And they'll still need 30 years of research into the effects of neutron embrittlement on construction materials before they're ready to start building them on production lines.

Transport: The rich might have supersonic bizjets, but they'll be expensive toys rather than mass transport. For the rest of us, there'll be high speed rail in dense areas (India, China, Europe, the eastern and western seaboards of North America), subsonic jets for crossing the blank spaces, and automobiles.

However. By 2032 I expect the developed world to have installed infrastructure for automated driving in many environments, and for many new cars to be largely (if not completely) automated. Even cheaper cars today can be bought with self-parking capability; Volvo are selling cars that automatically brake or take action to avoid pedestrians. This is a Moore's Law related tech, and by 2032 I expect collision avoidance systems to be mandatory on all post-2022 cars, and some self-driving. Cars will probably mostly be plug-in hybrids (battery for use around town, with a generator to take over for longer trips). And in dense urban centres (which is where most people outside the USA will be living) they'll be somewhat less popular. The 20th century was the century of the automobile, just as the 19th century was the century of the train.

Population: China's one child generation will be hitting retirement. China will, by 2032, be a primarily urban society with demographics like Japan circa the 1980s/1990s (villages where nobody is aged under 65; big cities: falling birth rates). India will be going in the same direction. The USA and EU are anyone's guess; the EU has seen a variety of local baby booms in the past decade which suggest the demographic transition may not result in a population crash but in oscillation around a couple of stable attractors. Been here before. The new insight I'd like to add is that, barring plagues like a pandemic form of H5N1 Bird flu or TDR-TB (which is worse than ferret-assisted plague flu), the global population will be a lot older, on average, than it is today.

If we play our cards right, that means the population won't be as physically able to carry out manual labour or farming activities (or to fight in mass armies) but will be better-educated and more experienced, albeit maybe less cognitively flexible. It'll also be overwhelmingly urban. Our species passed the 50% living in cities marker a few years ago, and the trend towards urbanization continues (as the countervailing trend towards farming being conducted on a larger scale by organizations also works to drive young rural people off the land).

Politics: It's fairly obvious that there's an ongoing global political crisis of legitimacy, and it's happening everywhere. In China, post-Tiananmen Square, the CPC is clinging on because it can deliver prosperity. In the Middle East, every government seems to have a crisis of legitimacy to a greater or lesser extent. In Europe, the crisis over the Euro needs to be considered in light of the democratic deficit in EU procedures, with one eye on Hungary's descent into one-party rule and, further east, to Russia where the aftershocks of 1991 continue to reverberate. The USA is not immune; while it has a solid democratic foundation, the mechanisms to enforce a police state are in place and a descent into plutocratic oligarchy is well advanced. About the only promising signs are that democratic forms are becoming the norm everywhere, even in areas formerly thought of as safe havens for tyranny, and that rapidly changing communications technologies combine to simultaneously inform and energize those people who are inclined to be informed and energized, and to narcotize those who aren't.

Space: Is a red herring in the short term. China will have a space station and maybe a flag on the moon. The USA will continue to send out increasingly sophisticated robot probes and might still be operating a space station. They might even have planted a flag on the moon (again) and have plans to go to Mars. (On the down side: a major political or fiscal crisis might be enough to do unto NASA what the collapse of the USSR did to the Soviet space infrastructure.) There will probably be continued commercial development in low earth orbit, including an orbiting hotel (for the plutocrats to play bunga-bunga games). And Elon Musk might still be in business and going balls-out for Mars. But by 2032 I don't expect there to be any major breakthroughs.

Food: Fish is probably going to cost more than beef products because we're on course to comprehensively fuck over the largest commercial fisheries, allowing opportunist species to replace the ecosystems we're strip-mining. Oceans are likely to be dominated by squid (edible) and jellyfish (not edible). There might still be freshwater fisheries with food species fed on processed jellyfish.

Cultured mammalian tissue is likely to be available. It'll be of about the same consistency as Quorn and will lack mouth appeal, but some folks will take to it (folks who like meat too much to go vegetarian today, but who have ethical qualms about eating animals and a big enough disposable income to pay).

There'll be widespread work in progress on genetically engineering plants to photosynthesize efficiently (or at all) at higher temperatures.

There will have been one or more famines or crop crashes and food price spikes caused by second-order effects of early and ill-advised GM crop roll-outs — see for example, Roundup-ready weeds (but I'm thinking it'll take something much more serious to get our attention).

Optionally, if we don't sort out the global plutocracy problem there will be famines and food price spikes caused by investors speculating on food price futures. (This has already happened; I'm predicting more of it unless we impose tougher controls on global food futures trading).

Electronics: Moore's Law will have played out by 2032; we'll have circuitry where the feature resolution is on the order of one or two atoms. Can't make it smaller. Can stack it vertically. A 2032 smartphone (and literally everyone will have a smartphone, or its successor) will compare in power to a 2012 iPhone 4S or Galaxy Nexus as one of those compares to a 1992 computer — a Macintosh Quadra 840 or a 486DX PC running Windows 3.1. The distinction between RAM and static storage (SSDs) will have faded to a gradation of access speed dominated by caching, displays will consume very little energy and have pixel pitch so fine that the human eye can barely see them, battery life will exceed one day in ordinary use, and gigabit wireless connection speeds will be the norm outside the home or office (at home/in office it'll tend towards the bandwidth constraint imposed by the atmosphere, i.e. 1-2 tb/sec shared between the devices in any given opaque-walled room or cubicle).

Poverty-stricken tribesmen in Papua New Guinea will get their introduction to modern technology via something that makes a 2012 smartphone look like a Motorola DynaTAC.

The internet: Will still be dominated by English speakers, but they'll have an Indian accent. Everybody will be on the net. Commercial television as we know it will have been sucked into video-over-IP. Ditto commercial radio. Telephones? They're the handset you use for Voice-over-IP. (Phone numbers as we know them will be obsolete.) Half of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia, Sony and IBM will no longer exist (if I knew which half I'd be planning my investments right now) and the list of the top ten net-related corporations will be radically different. We'll probably have poor simultaneous voice translation (driven by statistical analysis) and somewhat better offline translation of text. Many governments will censor the internet, or try to, because it will have become critical infrastructure. Newspapers as we know them today will either not exist, or no longer print ink on paper. Publishers of all media (as we know them today) will either not exist or barely be recognizable. Internet access will be recognized as a basic human right, notwithstanding draconian copyright enforcement legislation that demands infringers be cut off. Yes, this is a contradiction. As someone or other said, "information wants to be free: information also wants to be expensive".

Medicine: HIV will be curable — either through better anti retroviral drugs or through gene therapy (note that this is a first step towards developing a prosthetic immune system). Cancer ... we'll know a lot more about it. Many types of cancer will be manageable, albeit as a major nuisance illness subject to recurrent outbreaks and requiring unpleasant medicines to treat it (like HIV today). Some will remain rapidly fatal. No single silver bullet will banish all forms of cancer. Diseases of ageing (notably dementia) will get a lot of research money. Diseases of affluence, ditto. Research into antibiotics, at a dismal low in 2012, will have returned, either via the public sector or by hugely inflated incentives to the private sector. There will have been epidemics; TDR-TB is a real incentive to get back in the saddle on antibiotic research. Anti-viral drugs will be in better shape, with broad spectrum antivirals available (hopefully only under medical supervision, unlike the 1950-2010 global antibiotic fiasco).

Let's look further ahead. What about 2092?

I agree with Bruce Sterling: it's going to be a world of old people living in big cities who are afraid of the sky.

The climate will be well and truly fucked because we're not able to take preventative action far enough in advance to avoid the worst effects. Large chunks of the earth will have heat emergencies every year that render them uninhabitable by human beings without powered refrigeration. These chunks include some of the most densely populated areas (notably India and China). On the other hand, they coincide with maximum insolation, so the solar power to run the aircon will hopefully be available.

20-40% of mammalian species, 20-60% of reptiles, 40-80% of amphibia, and maybe 50% or more of insects will be extinct. (If it's hot enough to kill unprotected humans, the rest of the biosphere isn't going to fare well, and those regions that suffer the heat crises are the ones that harbour most biodiversity).

There will be 5-10 billion people. The low end represents a scenario where there is no breakthrough in life extension, no prolonged birth rate rebound from the demographic transition, and plagues or wars. The high end is merely the absence of one or more of those (unwanted) constraints. Between 50% and 80% of them will be city-dwellers, and their average age will be rising. Instead of a population pyramid, our age distribution will resemble a beehive (vertical sides, then a rounded top as folks nearing maximum life expectancy die off rapidly). Average age will be rising towards 50, from as low as 16 in some countries at the start of the century.

The age distribution shift in turn may be a predictor (in the absence of cognitive enhancement drugs or technologies) for a socially conservative, risk-averse global society. Note that this is socially conservative by mid-21st century standards, not by 2012 EU or US standards; what that means is hard to predict, but it'll be socially conservative against a background where the demographic transition lies far in the past and family planning (female education/emancipation plus access to contraception and abortion) is normal.

Politics I have no idea about, but it's not unreasonable to expect a gerontocracy dominated by the elderly, with a small, poor, disenfranchised youth sector.

The USA will not have been the dominant planetary superpower for at least fifty years. The EU won't have replaced it. China will be over the peak and probably a long way down the down-slope. The future belongs to someone else. Maybe Brazil or India?

Energy: trying to burn coal may just annoy the neighbours so much that they sue you. And if you refuse to turn up in court, they'll send drones to bomb your power stations and mine heads.

Fusion will be available in commercial form, if anyone needs a centralized monolithic plant that isn't viable below 5Gw thermal output, requires a grid to distribute the current, is inflexible, and leaves you with a thousand tonne core of high level waste. (But hey, no nasty plutonium!) My bet is that fusion plants won't be competitive with fission but may catch on for political reasons in places that need lots of energy (e.g. centralized industrial zones).

Solar will be ubiquitous; cells as cheap as wallpaper will ooze carbon-neutral diesel oil, or come with built-in storage batteries.

Orbital solar power won't be used for ground-based applications, unless there has been extensive mining and fabrication of components in orbit from asteroidal resources. I'm not betting on it by 2092, but I'm not betting against it either.

Transport:

Airliners ... will still be subsonic, for the most part. There may be sub-orbital shuttles for the rich, but the security issues are horrendous (anything capable of sending a 1%-er from London to Sydney in 40 minutes is functionally indistinguishable from an ICBM).

Automobiles drive themselves all the time. If you want to drive, you go to a track event. (Or you work on a farm or in an off-road situation.) You do not endanger third parties by driving manually in built-up areas. If you live in a city you don't own a car, but rent one or are part of a time-share coop for when you need one. Unless you're rich enough that circa 2012 you own a car and can pay a chauffeur.

Self-driving cars probably obviate the need for high speed rail in places like Asia east of the Urals or the US midwest: just get on a highway and tell the car to go as fast as it can within your fuel budget. For longer distances, tell it to take you to the airport.

Sea: much cargo will travel by sailing ship. Smart robot sailing ships that, thanks to weather satellites, never run into really bad storms and always know where the wind is blowing.

Land: low-speed rail (under 100km/h) predominates for cargo, and in the US, a lot of current long-haul trucking will move back onto rail. Rail will tend to electrify, for efficiency reasons, rather than relying on diesel.

But I expect there to be less cargo movement overall. Information flow can be used to find locally substitutable goods, and with energy costs remaining higher than during the 20th century there'll be a strong incentive to use them in preference to shipping stuff in from thousands of kilometres away.

Medical:

I think in 80 years' time we'll have cracked genomics, proteomics, and the whole epigenetic can of worms that the human genome project ran into five to ten years ago. I expect cancers to be a recurrent problem for an elderly civilization, but a manageable one. We should have a very good idea of how to arrest or reverse the ageing processes, although it may be difficult or impossible to apply some of these ideas to people now living. (Or then again, we might have a cheap, efficient pill that resets everyone's body clock to age 18. Whackiness on an unprecedented scale will then ensue, and not necessarily in a good way.) We should be able to grow organs and limbs to order, cure diabetes as a side-effect, and know enough about gut functioning to control muscle/fat distribution medically.

If you make it to 2092 and you're in need of medical treatment, it should be a good time to be alive (as long as the Plutocrats haven't totally gutted the social provision of healthcare). However ...

The human invasion of all ecosystems currently extant on Earth will have concluded. This means that the attack surface we expose to zoonoses will be maximized; anything that exists and can infect and eat us will do so. One or more plagues as lethal as SARS will get loose and kill between 1M and 1B people.

Incidentally, epidemics don't give a shit about whether your neighbour hasn't paid their health insurance fees or whether you believe in vaccination. By the end of the 21st century, government provided public health and epidemic suppression is going to be one of those things that is taken for granted, like having a standing military force: it's defence procurement against invading unicellular aliens.

There may also be human engineered plagues, because the necessary know-how to bolt together something really unpleasant will be as widespread as the know-how to build a primitive A-bomb is today, only without the need for unobtanium to fuel it. I'd normally poo-poo the idea of bioterrorism, and it seems particularly unlikely to come from governments or political non-state actors (like, oh, Al Qaida), but apocalyptic nutters like Aum Shinrikyo can't be ruled out.

Food:

Not many changes, except synthetic meat indistinguishable from the real thing (Kobe beef steak made from vat-grown Kobe beef muscle tissue!) will be available and is probably cheaper than the real thing. Not to mention not requiring the land surface and secondary energy inputs of animal husbandry. There's time for social accommodation to make the foodie scene get truly weird. Expect Charles Stross gammon steaks to be served at SF conventions.

Other:

We will have working molecular nanotechnology. This may be a wet squib equivalent to very-very-efficient-biotechnology, but it might go as far as Eric Drexler's wilder projections circa Engines of Creation. In which case, most other bets are off (and Elon Musk will get that retirement villa on Mars).

We will have completed experimental particle physics, insofar as it can be experimentally conducted in a gravity well on a planet only 40,000Km in circumference. To probe higher energies we'll either need new breakthroughs in accelerator technology or a particle accelerator bigger than the Earth's circumference. Maybe do-able in space.

There may be unforeseen side-effects, such as widespread deployment of technologies based on quantum physics (such as programmable matter or actual teleportation of macroscopic objects). There may be widespread deployment of quantum computers or quantum entanglement as a high bandwidth transmission channel for classical data.

We should have computing systems powerful enough to manage a synapse-level simulation of a human brain in real time and then some. We'll also have had time to map out the human neural connectome, even allowing for it to be harder than is currently apparent. Either we have the ability to simulate a human mind, or it's impractical (either for ethical reasons (what happens when you switch it off?) or because the quantum woo-woo pedlars like Roger Penrose are correct, or because synapses are a distraction and the real mechanics happen at a molecular scale).

Aside from neural connectome stuff and quantum weirdness, computing, networking, and software will be about as interesting as railroad train design: a mature field in which breakthroughs are still possible but which the general public ignores, except when it's time to buy a ticket. It's certainly not where geeks go to work on cool new shit.

One interesting effect is that computing will be cheap—if a process can be sped up by adding microprocessors to it, it will be. Expect farms where every single plant has a solar-powered computer tagged to it, monitoring it for stress caused by pathogens and parasites and need for nutrients. Expect sofas with springs that remember your personal preference for firm or soft support and adapt to whoever's sitting in them. Expect more intelligence in your environment than you can possibly imagine a need for.

A tale is told of two computer scientists back in the 1970s, discussing the new microprocessors. "They're going to be cheap! A dollar each!" One of them explained. "But who needs computers that cheap? What are they going to do, use them as doorknobs?" Asked his friend. Ten years later, the computer scientist was checking into a hotel room and suddenly looked at the card-key in his hand and realized, yes, there was a computer in every doorknob.

Imagine a very smart networked computer attached to every genetically engineered maize plant in a field in a poor rural backwater of Uganda. And that they discuss how fast they're growing via wifi and agree a nutrient plan to optimize growth, including restricting water to one particular plant that's shadowing a couple of others. The farmer, aged 80, harvests them via a quadrotor drone from the comfort of his air-conditioned farmhouse. (The quadrotor is powered by methanol fermented from their discarded husks.) When he needs to sell them, he hires a self-driving cargo truck to come and pick them up. And maybe hitches a ride to the clinic in town in the unoccupied cab. to get his anti-cancer booster shots updated Implausible? Partly because in the long term, things change more than we expect. But mostly because he's one of the 20% who don't live in cities.

But. The elephant in the living room that I've ignored in this discussion is the effect of all these changes on the psychology of the people living through them. And so I'm going to try to find time to talk about the psychological effects of the 21st century later this week.

(Just for the record, I want Santorum to win the nomination. Just so I can see another conceding-defeat family group portrait like this one. It's so Edward Gorey!)