As I get THE OCULUS LINK: INTERSECT ready for release, I’m writing the next book, which takes place in the future. And, I have to say… I had no idea how much fun that would be!
It’s also challenging. For even the smallest things that we take for granted — phones, cooking, clothes — I’m imaging what they could be like in 50 years. And, of course, a lot of research goes into this. For example, did you know that curse words have changed very little over the past hundred years? We’ll probably still be saying the same ones for the next hundred. Technology, on the other hand, well, we all know how much that changes every few months.
Back to the Future was one of my favorite movies growing up, and in the second film in the series (not as good, but respectable), Marty goes to the future — to 2015, in fact. Next year!
I don’t know if we’ll be flying cars then, but the movie did get some predictions right, like flat-panel TVs on walls, the ability to watch multiple channels at once and body-controlled videogames. Even the hoverboard might be on its way.
BookBaby borrowed a graphic from Printer Inks on books that forecast the future. It’s a fabulous graphic, listing the likes of Jules Verne’s 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon predicting lunar launches from Florida, which happened over a century later in 1969. And Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book Looking Backwards, which predicted credit cards before they were invented in 1950. And one of my personal favorites, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy predicted real-time automatic audio translation in 1980, and this year, there’s an app for that.
I don’t know if anything in the world of my books will be real some day, but it’s fun to imagine it.
What things would you like to see invented in the future? Maybe you’ll see some of them in my book…