Filed under: General Musings, Predictions, Press, Promotion, tech, Writing stuff
So, I was checking stats for the book and this blog this morning, and decided to follow one of the search links shown. And on that, I saw a listing for a Wikipedia page for me.
Huh.
No, I didn’t do it. To be honest, I signed up for a Wikipedia account the first of this year, as I was working to organize the various components for promoting Communion. Like this blog, I figured that it was a marketing tool that I would want to have in place at some point, and knew that there was likely a lag-time between signing up and creating pages (a common precaution to limit vandalism on such sites). But I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with it yet, being busy with a number of other aspects of this endeavour and life.
But this one was last changed in June ’06. And has some dated and slightly incorrect information. And has me listed as being an ‘Internet Personality’. Very odd. But you may be amused to see what it says presently, so I won’t get in there and muck around with it for a while (I *am* still busy). Have fun.
Jim Downey
As I mention on the homepage for Communion, one of the dangers in writing near-term speculative fiction is being outpaced by the real flow of events in the world, whether that is political, social, technological, or scientific. Which is why early on I try and convey that the novel is set in an alternative time-line, thereby giving myself some leeway to be at odds with what actually happens.
But still, you run the real risk of being dated. In the prequel to Communion, titled St. Cybi’s Well (still very much just starting to work on this book), I’m writing about 2012 – only 5 years from now. One of the key items I had initially conceived of for that book was what I called a ‘UniPod’ – a small, Blackberry-sized device which had nothing but a screen on one side, and which would serve as a phone, satellite radio, music system, palm-top computer – you get the idea. Sound familiar? It should – it’s what the Apple iPhone looks like and basically how it functions (I’m sure the additional capabilities will be built in soon enough). And it already exists, four years ahead of schedule.
Likewise, the pace of world events isn’t what I establish as the basis for my ‘future history’. In it, there has already been a nuclear attack against Israel, and they have unveiled (and put into operation) a plan to establish a substantial colony on the Moon using conventional heavy-lift rockets. Unlikely? Maybe. Outlandish? No – I don’t think so.
But these kinds of things get in the way of people getting into the novel, I think. For any work of fiction, you need a willing suspension of disbelief, and a lot of people have a hard time divorcing current events from what I speculate upon. Yet if you were to go back to 2000, and say that you predict where we are today – bogged down in a nightmare in Iraq, significant curtailment of our civil liberties here at home, seeing the resurgence of Russia as a major power, et cetera – I think a lot of people would have a hard time swallowing it. But having lived through it, being there for each twist and turn, it all makes emotional sense to us now. Solid enough emotional sense that some people have a hard time imagining anything different.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 