Beam Yourself Up: Creating the Future at Your Desk
Writers, this is your time! It’s the most exciting, amazing time to be alive. There are more subjects for you to write books about, more forms and media in which to express yourself, more ways to reach readers, and more ways to enrich yourself in the process.
A number years ago, people thought going to the moon was impossible. Consider these “impossibilities” that are going to happen and how you can use them in your writing:
- Being able to live forever at the height of our powers will happen by 2050.
- Harnessing the power of nature to create energy means the cost of raw material will be nothing. You’ll be able to power your house with the solar energy collected by your windows.
- In fifteen years, computers will be 1,000 times more powerful.
- Nanotechnology will enable the replication of (almost?) anything. There will be molecule-size machines coursing through our bodies monitoring our health and dispensing medicine.
- Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak is in the works.
- Time travel is possible.
- A prototype for a camera that can see around corners already exists.
- Telepathy will become the ultimate form of text messaging.
Only time and resources separate us from making anything we can conceive a reality. Preventing hurricanes and tornadoes, and getting tectonic plates to stop rubbing each other the wrong way; these will also take a while. But if we can survive our frailties and natural catastrophes, we will do it.
All of these wonders are fodder for the imagination. Consider what all of the world’s brightest, most creative people collaborating on touch-screen, voice recognition computers they carry in their pockets will accomplish.
It must be getting harder to write science fiction. Star Trek takes place three centuries in the future. But by that time, technology will be far more advanced than what Captain Kirk had access to. Our future is only limited by your imagination. What a huge gift for writers life’s possibilities are! Can you use the future in your writing to help us understand the present so we can get there?
The past is history; the future is a mystery; and the present is a present. Unwrap it, beam yourself into the future, let your mind take flight, and don’t worry about your destination, just enjoy the ride. Then figure out how to use what you discover in your writing.
The Eighth San Francisco Writers Conference / A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community / President’s Day Weekend, February 18-20, 2011 / Mark Hopkins InterContinental Hotel on Nob Hill / Keynoters: Dorothy Allison & David Morrell / Pitch your book to agents and editors from both coasts / More than 50 breakout sessions / 100 presenters / www.sfwriters.org / sfwriterscon@aol.com / blog: https://sfwriters.org/blog / free MP3s at www.sfwriters.info / open to anyone: a day of in-depth classes on Monday, February 21st
New! San Francisco Writers University: Where Writers Meet and You Learn, a project of the San Francisco Writers Conference / Laurie McLean, Dean / www.sfwritersu.com
Now is the most exciting time to be alive and be a writer.
