Saturday May 24, 2025

More author/reader musings

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1725:

Edgar and friends update: Edgar never came back yesterday, and the tiny one in the other corner disappeared during the day as well, and none returned as of this morning. But last night my husband found one on the wall upstairs behind his night stand. Had something wrapped up in its web, which was gone by this morning (the daddy long legs was still there.) This one upstairs is smaller than Edgar, but larger than the others I saw downstairs. I will keep you informed of its progress as well.

Friday, and today started out cloudy, then sun. This is very typical May weather. In fact we are having more sun this month than usual (which we normally call “May Gray.”

Yesterday, I was actually a little chilly on my first walk, which I did only 30 minutes because I had my new (identical to old ones) walking shoes on. I did get in second walk before lunch, and so far, no problems with the new shoes. Had my phone call, got some journaling done, but no novella writing. This morning is packed full, between the longer time to thoroughly clean upstairs, taking my first walk, a scheduled zoom call at 9, and then a niece and husband, who are in town to visit their daughter. Once again, I hope to work on novella this afternoon—if I don’t get tempted to just read instead.

Yesterday, I finished Gibson’s fourth book, Virtual Light, which was published in 1993, 5 years after the last of the Sprawl Trilogy. What is interesting, is that the Sprawl Trilogy was set between 40 and 70 years in the future, while this second series, the Bridge series, is only set 13 years in the future (2006). The result is that in this second series there was less made up new tech and more projecting what might happen in this short period of time to some of the real new technology (like cell phones, computers) and some of the very real problems (pollution, poverty, viruses.)

The result is if you read Virtual Light from the perspective of today, it really doesn’t seem much like science fiction, and seems rather antiquated, with faxes still being ubiquitous, gas powered cars, satellite dishes on roofs and no direct streaming for TV.

What is most “futuristic” in the book is new tech to produce virtual reality (built in small projectors and glasses.) Yet, like “flying cars,” that have become a joke in science fiction--because they are always supposed to be right around the corner, and they never are--the idea of Virtual Reality—falls a bit flat, since here, 20 years later, we still haven’t seen the promise of virtual reality coming true.

Then there is the use of the AIDS epidemic and the development of a vaccine in the book, which made sense given the book being written in the early 1990s, but again, reading the book now, this makes it seem more like historical fiction than science fiction…although the mention that this epidemic is just the first of multiple pandemics (and anti-vaccination movements) that come after, rings particularly true. In short, this book is revealing some of the dangers of writing near future science fiction that doesn’t try to project too far in the future. As a reader, I can accept that if I am reading a contemporary mystery set in the 1970s, there won’t be cell phones, but some how a science fiction book feels sort of silly if they, or something even more sophisticated doesn’t exist.

In a more positive light, this fourth book did continue to show Gibson’s growing maturity as a writer in terms of his character development.

More roses, and now I have to rush off to get in my first walk.

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