A Cautionary Tale?
Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy built titanic writing careers by telling ripping yarns that spiked our familiar world with seed crystals of tomorrow’s technology and deftly avoided being categorized as science fiction. No, these weren’t stories about spaceships and aliens*, they were techno-thrillers. Keep that straight or the marketing department will have harsh words for you.
The techno-thriller trades robustness for accessibility. It only asks its readers to believe one impossible thing before breakfast. Accept that one dollop of Andromeda or the purr of Red October’s stealth drive, and you’ve bought your ticket to a wild ride. Millions of readers did so at the bookstore. Millions more bought tickets for the film adaptations. The price paid is that the stories aren’t durable. The technologies brought to bear on containing the Andromeda Strain were bleeding edge in the late 1960s. A modern-day WILDFIRE lab would have vastly more sophisticated tools on hand. Red October’s (movie) magnetohydrodynamic drive remains futuristic. The novel’s take on the stealth drive has been more-or-less implemented. (Clancy did major research on near-future submarine warfare.) The Cold War that the drive threatened to destabilize is long over. These two tales of tomorrow became alt-history novels in their author’s lifetime. I admit that I’d be happy to fail in a similar fashion. #BestsellingAuthorProblems
Moore’s Law Looms
Moore’s Law has proven to be prophetic, both in terms of literal chip density and in anticipating the expansion of software applications made possible by the more powerful hardware. Progress across all fields of technology is accelerated by advances in computing. Writing a techno-thriller in a world where Moore’s Law is in play is like surfing a huge, churning, fast-moving wave. Aiming your story just ahead of the wave is a tricky balancing act. If you don’t position yourself at the right point on the face of the wave, it will overrun you and wipe your story out.
The threat extends beyond story’s seed crystal. Characters in a techno-thriller employ today’s tech to meet the challenge of tomorrow’s invention or discovery. If there’s an app for a problem, they should use it. If that app is Uber, and between the time the story is written and is published Uber falls into obscurity as Johnny Cab takes over, then your day-after-tomorrow story seems rather yesterday.
Place Your Bets
As its own take on the techno-thriller, Raether’s Enzyme has already been buffeted by the waves of change that have been crashing around us in the early 21st Century. Per a previous post, the story required a technological upgrade and some changes to the plot in the course of novelizing the old screenplay. Working through those changes brought the subject of this post into sharp focus. Technology is intertwined with our lives like never before. If I neglected a contemporary technology, today’s reader would rebel at the oversight. If I invested too much of the story in the wrong tech, my techno-thriller would become a retro-thriller for tomorrow’s reader. It was a tricky balancing act, and it is not over.
Without getting into too far into spoiler territory, here are some of the techno-bets I made:
- Facebook, hashtags, and viral media are with us for the immediate future.
- Identity remains fragmented and susceptible to theft.
- Computer security continues to be a problem for governments, companies, and individuals.
- Online anonymity is still possible if you’re willing to put in some effort.
- Government surveillance is formidable, but not omniscient.
- Corporate surveillance is formidable, but not omniscient.
- Private surveillance is more formidable than most people know, but not omniscient.
- Blockchains and cryptocurrencies have not disrupted banking or common contracts.
- Analyzing and synthesizing complex biomaterials is a hard problem.
- Smartphones continue to claim an important share of our attention.
At the point when any of these bets are lost, the story becomes a retro-thriller.
The biggest bet in Raether’s Enzyme is one that I would be overjoyed to lose. As of this writing, we do not have a general cure for, or vaccine against, cancer. If an unexpected discovery, a glorious Black Swan, upended our understanding of this complex class of diseases by revealing a single agent of deliverance, I would set my manuscript aside and dance in the street. Until then, the mysterious and wholly imaginary substance known as Raether’s enzyme remains the seed crystal that catalyzes the plot and nucleates the themes of my techno-thriller.
Beyond Technodome
Technology isn’t the only threat to techno-thriller shelf-life. Fashion, pop culture, and slang can also drag the story back into last year. This problem is exacerbated for techno-thriller movies. Michael Crichton wrote and directed a number of films when he wasn’t writing best-sellers, including Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and The 13th Warrior. One that you probably haven’t seen is Looker. The techno-thriller seed crystals for Looker are fresh enough to work today. A high-tech advertising company is paying models to get very specific plastic surgeries, after which the models are scanned and their digital replicas go on to have a career with the company and the model collects royalties. Except the models are dying under suspicious circumstances and their killer may be invisible. The story works today, but the film captures the early 1980s in an amber of hairstyles, clothing, and, well, everything.
A novel can limit how much of the present sticks to it, but there is a cost. Sparse descriptions of characters allow/require the reader to dress and coif them in a contemporary style. Choosing common and long-lived makes and models of vehicles lets/demands the reader supply the right model year. Unless Tesla’s marketing department is paying you for Model S product placement, it’s safer to put your executive in an Audi sedan. As the /’s above suggest, the cost is born by the reader, who has to supply the details the author omitted. The deal can work for both parties. A reader doesn’t usually select a techno-thriller in hopes that the author will pause the action and use a detailed description to capture a trenchant snapshot of the zeitgeist. If the reader knows the character, the details will follow as needed.
The greater challenge is with dialog. By their words and deeds are characters known. Dialog must reveal a mix of who the character is and how she wants to be perceived. Voices must be distinct and provide color, even if that color is a somber earth tone. If the color is the lime green slang that was hip when the story was written, odds are that it will have oxidized to a 1970s avocado green before the second printing. One way to avoid this is to draw slang from an argot palette. This works well in the techno-thriller genre, which leans towards military and technical characters. Military and technical readers will eventually see stale slang, but the general audience is less likely to be bothered by it. Characters from outside the mil-tech milieu may benefit from customized argot. This involves creating a style which is consistent enough to be recognizable as itself and is distinct from contemporary trends. A prime example of this approach is Buffy Speak. Raether’s Enzyme uses a blend of these approaches for its core group of young technologists.
Pop-culture references aren’t typical in the techno-thriller genre, but I thought my younger characters would make use of them. You see the problem. The solution I arrived at involved blending extremely old references (arising from the characters’ joint ironic exploration of old movies) with call-outs to obscure anime of my own invention. It’s something of a kludge, but it adds some light humor and illustrates a generational divide that plays out in the story’s conflict.
A dragon lives forever…
but not so techno-thrillers. I accept that. My story belongs in the very near future. That’s where it will make its stand.
* To be fair, The Andromeda Strain did feature a spacecraft returning to Earth bearing an extraterrestrial organism.