Pure Writerly Moments 2 (Short Stories, Essays, Book Reviews, and More)

The Year 2040 - A Statues in the Cloud Research Brief

The Synopsis for the Novel "Statues in the Cloud"

One day, a writer in Japan receives a letter from a young fan who is dying from a mysterious disease. The young fan, Aya, gives the writer a challenge -- come to Nagasaki and help find seven pieces of a statue. If you can help me do this simple thing, she tells him, you will have cured me. What the writer soon finds out is that finding the seven pieces means telling the stories of seven unique individuals: a politician, a soldier, a folk hero, a dancer, an AI, a writer, and the story of Aya herself.

The Year 2040 - or 2045

For the novel, I had to build my very own version of 2040 or 2045. I will use 2045 if the book doesn't end up being published until 2025 or so.

The Rules of Time Travel (through narration). I had to leave this future somewhat vague. The idea is that the writer couldn't see the future clearly in a way that would allow him to change it. For example, he would know that holograms were a thing of the future without knowing which companies would pioneer it. (Thus, he couldn't invest in these companies). I'm not sure if my rules of time travel through story-telling make sense, but in my mind they do.

So, in the future, there are a number of new technologies.

For example:

The sonic rail, which allows people to travel at great speeds using the rail system. Thus, people can commute to Tokyo from very far away places. The speed of the train is supported by technologies that reduce friction with the ground. Other than that, I have no details about this technology.

Solar energy, self-driving cars, and technologies on phones that make it easy to block sound are very popular.

Cell phone technology. This was the hardest to write because for some reason I still saw people carrying their cellphones around twenty years from now. My best explanation for this is that in the 2030s, there were bio-nano phones that you could implant in your fingers. You could simply project your screen into the air by touching your thumb and pointer finger. But for some reason, they weren't popular after a few years and people went "retro." Instead of projecting their screen into the air as they did ten years ago (2030s), people actually prefer to touch a screen. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but it makes enough sense in my mind, so I went with it.

The holoweb is a place where you can interact with things and people as holograms. Holographic mapping rooms in Japan serve the same role that karaoke booths and internet cafes do today. If you are poor and need a "poor man's vacation," you can rent out a holo-room for a bit. I think there is also this idea that you could have holo-sensitive clothes. When you wear this special shirt, you can feel sensations.

Things I haven't developed well so far (and may never develop well): a sense of the fashion style of 2040, a sense of popular music...are convenience stores still "the thing" that organize people's lives in Japan? The trick is to think about the future without falling into SF and cyberpunk cliches.

Also, if robots are so pervasive, then how do people relate to them? Like people? Do some older Japanese see them as "foreigners" or are they okay because they are Japanese-made?

Here is a bizarre question, but one worth asking: If you are a childless couple, could you have a robot serve the same emotional role as a child? If you are an elderly person who has no child or whose children neglect you, would you develop a strong emotional attachment to your robot caregiver? (I'm thinking about the movie "Robot and Frank" now).

What a great movie, by the way, if you haven't watched it.

The geopolitics of the 2040s was the hardest thing to write. And it was best to keep it vague. The big idea of the book is that there is some kind of nuclear disaster in France (probably around 2037) that leads to a hibakusha diaspora community in Japan. My best guess is that it involves some kind of attack at nuclear sites or some other kind of accident. The hardest part to explain in this chapter is "the nuclear stain" -- the idea that everything affected by the disaster is in some way tainted. Scientifically, that might not make sense in 2040 since the technology for diagnosing and treating radiation might be very advanced. Europe will be increasingly destabilized, but Asia will continue to be a region of dynamic economies and technology.

Other scattered elements of the future: old media, such as print newspapers and magazines might make a comeback; Climate change will be in full swing and "Save Bangladesh" campaigns will be popular; Pacific Islands will be gone (these groups might be in Hiroshima too).

I will continue to work on these elements and develop them, but my experiment with 2040 will come to a close when Draft 5 of the novel is finished.

What lessons did I learn from trying to write about the future? First, it's hard to be original these days. There is nothing I can write that hasn't been developed somewhere in an SF movie or book. So, don't worry about trying to be great, but try to avoid the worse cliches. Hopefully, I've done that -- avoided too many cliches, I mean. The second lesson...forgive yourself when you can't make a completely believable future.