Nothing is harder to predict than the future
A long time ago, I started writing a novel that now feels kind of obsolete
This is a long story with a lot of moving parts, but I’ll try to keep it simple and stick with the angle that suggested itself the other day as I wrote about generative AI and changing technology. The rest will wait for other posts, depending on how many of you are interested in the full story.
Some introduction is necessary, and I’ll get through it as quickly as I can. 20 years ago, Guardians of Order hired me to contribute a chapter to a companion book for the 3rd Edition of Big Eyes Small Mouth, their anime-themed roleplaying game. It was supposed to be a compendium of various original campaign settings — something that BESM had never had before — each setting tied to a particular anime genre or combination of genres. I was assigned a world called Imago, which the developer described to me as “technopunk.” It was supposed to be futuristic, with technology beyond what we have in the present day, but not so far beyond that it would seem exotic or impossible in the year 2004. He gave me a few examples to start me off, like genetically-engineered pets and maglev scooters, then left the rest to me. Life in Imago was dominated by zaibatsu-like mega-corporations and a world government called Global Economic Oversight, but none of it was supposed to be particularly sinister — not dark and edgy like true cyberpunk, but more like cyberpunk lite. It turned out to be a decent fit for my temperament, and I had a lot of fun writing my part of the book. I saved the flavor fiction chapter intro to write last. I decided that I would goof around with it and chaotically jam as many different genre-based story lines into it. But I started with a vignette focusing on a teenaged boy and his android substitute mom:
“It is time to wake up…. It is time to wake up.”
Kenji stirred and groaned. When he opened his eyes, he was staring up into the shiny aluminium face of the Exodynamics PAAL MomDroid MA-1 that his father had bought two years to the day after his mother’s death. It still freaked him out that Dad had named her Akiko, after his mother, and that he insisted that Kenji call her ‘Mom.’
“Urgh…. What time is it?”
“It is now 7:04 AM. You do not want to be late for school on the day of your big game.”
The big game, yes. That afternoon after school his SHI Mega-Academy meteor ball team would face off against those stupid trolls from HydraCorp Mega-Academy for the Nila City Academic League Junior Varsity Championship. They were underdogs, and they would need a strong effort from him. And he had slept right through his alarm clock going off, instead wrapped up in yet another dream about what he had seen that night he went out to the vending machine near Yuri’s apartment building for a genetically-modified mango juice. He didn’t think he could ever forget that… being… whatever it was… wrapped in a gauzy glow, standing in the alley, neither of them sure whether or not they should run for their lives….
“I made you a nice breakfast.”
The MomDroid’s face still hovered over him. There was a muted whirring noise as the corners of her mouth turned up in a smile. Exodynamics knew what they were doing when they designed her. Maybe the consumer really did matter to them, like their advertisements always said. She did make pretty good rice balls, Kenji would give her that.
[Yes, “aluminium.” Guardians of Order was a Canadian publisher, and they used British spellings.]
When I wrote that, the Roomba was barely a thing and a fully-fledged humanoid domestic android, like Rosie in “The Jetsons,” seemed way far off. It didn’t seem implausible that it should have a bare metal face, like the iconic robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, especially since Kenji’s dad cheaped out and bought a low-end model.
Well, if you’re wondering where you can get a copy of the BESM 3rd Edition Companion… it was never published. Guardians of Order went out of business first. White Wolf later picked up the right to publish the core rule book, but they were not interested in the Companion. Eventually, I received a letter informing me that I would not be paid beyond the advance that I had already received, but that all rights to what I had written would revert to me.
Unfortunately, I had fallen in love with my work on Imago, and I couldn’t bear to let it drop. I decided to take the flavor fiction and flesh it out into a novel. It was to be a jokey love letter to anime on the one hand — but also a serious story about a lad haunted by his mother’s untimely death, alienated from the world around him and people who were once close to him, who must decide whether or not it’s worth his bother to defend them from a murderous threat from another world.
10 years after Guardians of Order approved my original manuscript, I rewrote the opening scene to focus on the protagonist and his deceased mother:
Kenichi didn’t know where he was, but he knew there was snow everywhere. Blanketing the ground, falling from the sky, all the way out to the limitless horizon. Somewhere in his mind he thought, It’s still winter.
A lone figure stood in the middle of the snow field. As Kenichi drew closer, it resolved itself as a woman in a pure white kimono that blended with the snow around her. Her dark hair fell in lank strands by the sides of her face. He recognized his mother’s bright eyes and cheerful face, but the hair was all wrong; his mother always kept her hair in a tidy, presentable bob. Even so, he felt her beckoning to him, saw her aura reach out to sweep him into her embrace —
“Good morning. Time for you to wake up and go to school.”
The muted purr of his father’s Spectrum Heavy Industries PAAL MomDroid MA-1 jerked Kenichi out of the deep, dark hole of sleep. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into the household ‘droid’s impassive textured-plasticine face. The engineers at SHI had tried their best, but they still couldn’t get the face to look exactly lifelike; the movements of the lips were too abrupt to pass as human, and there was still something blank and soulless about the eyes. Whenever it spoke, the words came out as a string of samples rather than a convincing approximation of natural speech. But then again, his father had bought the cheaper model. Maybe the MA-2 wasn’t as... creepy.
Kenichi grunted and eased himself upright in bed. “Urghh... What time is it?”
“It is seven... thirty... four... AM... and twenty... nine... seconds. It is time for you to wake up and go to school.”
Yeah. Just like Pops to buy the cheaper model.
I’m not quite sure now why I changed his name to Kenichi. If I had a reference in mind, I have forgotten it now. More importantly, the last revision date on the files for this project is 2019, so at the latest I worked on it 15 years after I first imagined Imago. Notice that I felt that the MomDroid needed a more natural face, even if it was a low-end model. By that point, not only was Roomba so commonplace that videos of cats riding them, shot for YouTube clout, were a thing, but the Japanese were actually developing lifelike robotic domestic servants to help cope with their graying population. Maglev scooters may not exist yet, but hoverboards are real. Genetically-modified mango juice seemed old hat by 2019. I added a reference to vocal sampling as a nod to Vocaloid, which did not exist in 2004, and later in Chapter 1 I worked in a passing mention of a Hatsune Miku-like virtual idol. My original futuristic Imago was looking too much like the present or even the recent past.
I set aside the novel because I felt like I got so bogged down in world-building that the story wasn’t moving quickly enough. Or maybe I never satisfactorily worked out a plan to get from Point B to the end. I haven’t given up on it, though. I hope to finish it someday, before the clock runs out on me. But it’s just too big a task to finish and polish it up if it’s just a side hack. I will have to look at it afresh and figure out how to make the future look like the future again, because what used to look like the future looks too much like the present — or even the recent past — right now.