Tuesday, May 13, 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 1714:

Yesterday, not as hot, but did get up to the mid 70s. I got in both walks, phone call, a little writing (didn’t hit my 500 goal), but mostly I read.

As a result, I am well into the second book, Count Zero, by William Gibson. It is listed as a part of the Sprawl trilogy (the sprawl is name for the continuous eastern coast urban/suburban area from Boston to Atlanta in the near future). None of the main characters are the same as in Neuromancer, although there are small mentions of events as that are clearly from the first book. However, most of the technology and terminology is the same, including some of the anachronistic aspects of the near future—like the fact that Gibson didn’t foresee things like cell phones, while on the other hand, being incredibly prescient in terms of things like “cyberspace” and hacking.

Gibson himself addressed some of these issues himself in a new introduction to Neuromancer that he wrote in 2004 (twenty years after the book was written.) He points out when he made things up completely (like cyberspace, the matrix) the writing feels very real 20 years later because so much of it actually came true, or didn’t clash with what people could imagine happening in the future. The problems came, he writes, when he “…was unlucky enough to actually have some small bit of real knowledge, the reader finds things like the rattling keys of a mechanical printer, or Case’s puzzling urgent demand…for a modem.” In short, when he has people using pay phones in the future—this strikes the reader as anachronistic.

Because I read these books first nearly 40 years ago, I had no trouble with reading about modems and personal computers and printers, because they were really new. For example, I wrote my dissertation in 1982 on an electric typewriter (and the data analysis I did two years earlier was put onto punch cards, then transformed into gigantic tapes, that then were analyzed in some huge university computer and printed out on paper for me to look at!) So the computer technology seemed as futuristic as cyberspace.

This substack post I ran across does an excellent job of describing this sort of issue, only in this case the reader is responding to reading the books 40 years later!

This reminded me that some of the same issues that came up for me in my own near future science fiction Caelestis series. In 2014 when I and fellow authors came up with the world we were building in the Paradisi Chronicles, space elevators were being really pushed as a way to get materials up into space to build space stations. There was even an organization pushing this idea that suggested they might publish our stories if we included space elevators in them! Ten years later, no one much talks about space elevators as a real option, so someone reading these stories now or in the future would probably not find this bit of near future tech particularly prescient.

On the other hand, ten years ago I decided that the 10 founding families of the new colony in another galaxy should represent the ten wealthiest individuals on Earth. And I made their motivation for investing in the technology to explore space their selfish decision to spend their money—not on fixing Earth’s problems—but on finding a way for them and their friends to leave Earth. While I saw some of this reflected in Bezos and Musk’s race to produce private rockets, which is why I created this narrative, I had no idea how prevalent this attitude among the wealthy billionaires would become ten years later (or the political power they would get in the US.) So, I would imagine people reading my books right now would have no trouble seeing my narrative about the ten founding families of New Eden as a real possibility in the near future.

All this musing about fact and fiction is something I have also considered when writing my historical fiction. I am constantly trying to make sure I am completely accurate in my descriptions – for example where there would be electric lights, or in current female fashion—and that I use words or slang that would be used in that perid. But I have also discovered that sometimes a word that is historically accurate can sound too modern and not like something people would use in the past. This is sort of the opposite with science fiction, when you want the reader to feel like the word might be one used in the future.

Anyway, I think tomorrow I will pull out a post I wrote once about this problem and repost it here, the title is “The Dude Abides: Changing Definitions of Words and Historical Fiction.” Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, more flowers.

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