When events overtake science fiction

In Henderson's Tenants, which I began over ten years ago, people use different kinds of computer interfaces, including glasses. The story really starts when Mike Henderson, using his glasses to interact with the computer taped to his wrist, gets mugged and loses the glasses. This puts him effectively offline until he can get home and interact with the "pixelite" wall screen in his apartment.

Now, via TPMIdeaLab, you can see What Using Google’s High-Tech Glasses Looks Like (VIDEO). And the images, amazing as they are, are pretty close to what I imagined (except that Mike's computer has a Siri-like avatar he has conversations with).

This isn't the first time events have overtaken my SF. I wrote Brother Jonathan in 1983 and set it in the late 21st century, when people tote clipboard-size computers with (physical) keyboards and 3D screens. I knew about personal computers, but I was still writing on an IBM Selectric and couldn't imagine an iPad turning up in under a century.

And when Lifter, published in 1986, got a second life in 1992 I had to update the desktop-computer technology to match six years' progress. Now I've updated it again (but haven't got round to publishing it as an e-book), and that required ditching the public phone as a plot device and moving events through the kids' smartphones.

If I ever get round to finishing Henderson's Tenants, I'm going to have to move it from the summer of 2030 to some indeterminate time in mid-century or even later. And that means I'll have to wrack my too-conservative brains to imagine the consequences of technology still further advanced.

Comments

[Wil]

Interesting - I was just thinking about this very topic and google glasses was my main example. It all goes back to cell phones, I think, and how they killed the classic horror film "alone in the woods an no way to call for help" trope.