Medium future slips into alternate history
Friday, June 13th, 2008 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manDespite having effectively stopped writing, I'm still submitting stories for publication from time to time... only this delay between writing and sale is having an attritive effect on my near-future stories. There's a story I wrote back in 1999 (and revised, after already submitting to some markets, in 2003), which was set a dozen years, perhaps more, in the future. I tried to give it a futuristic flavour by sticking in references to some cool technologies that were then on the horizon.
Unfortunately, the delay has meant real life has been catching up, contradicting the names I've given for these, and removing the futuristic feel. I've had to revise the story slightly now, changing "route mapper" to "satnav Q-buster" (the idea is that it combines navigation with directing you away from congested routes), and "vidblog" to "vlog". The HCI interface I used is not yet widespread, but is no longer futuristic. I think I ought to stick a few more new technologies in there somewhere, just to restore that dozen years in the future feel...
Unfortunately, the delay has meant real life has been catching up, contradicting the names I've given for these, and removing the futuristic feel. I've had to revise the story slightly now, changing "route mapper" to "satnav Q-buster" (the idea is that it combines navigation with directing you away from congested routes), and "vidblog" to "vlog". The HCI interface I used is not yet widespread, but is no longer futuristic. I think I ought to stick a few more new technologies in there somewhere, just to restore that dozen years in the future feel...
