WriteHive Panel: Believable Technology in Fiction
Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay
One of the panels I watched from the WriteHive online conference was Believable Technology in Fiction. It was a great panel about how to make technology work in your fiction, most often but not always science fiction.
The panelists started by talking about technology on the whole, defining it as something that solves a problem and/or makes live easier, that is decidedly not magic. When it comes to making it believable technology, they emphasized several points, including how it’s executed and incorporated into the rest of the world or setting. They also pointed out that it should be on a reasonable trajectory from real-world technology. And they also talked about how even technology that’s solving problems will inevitably have downsides, using the example of email, which brought about electronic spam and phishing, as a real-world case in which the technology both helped people and made their lives more difficult.
The panelists also talked about how elements of technology can make a given piece of fiction seem like hard or soft sci-fi, depending on how it’s handled. Fiction where there’s a focus on the technology and explanations of it, along with more details of the science behind the tech, tends to get lumped into hard sci-fi, while the so-called “soft sciences” (like psychology) and a level of handwaving of the details gets called soft sci-fi. However, one panelist pointed out that something that was state-of-the-art at the time it was written or published can wind up feeling dated and less like hard sci-fi after time passes. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with what were then very new theories on electricity, and H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which dealt with microbes, are no longer seen as hard sci-fi, but the technologies they used to inspire their books were very cutting edge at the time.
Finally, the panelists discussed the fact that believable technology needs to have a concrete problem that it solves to justify why the tech was developed. They also recommended making any technology fully intertwined with the fabric of the world you’re writing, to include social and commercial repercussions, but also slang related to the technology.
The panel covered way more than I’ve mentioned here, so be sure to check it out! And you can also find many other panels from 2023 and earlier on the WriteHive YouTube channel.
Comments