When I wrote TimeSplash, I had to think hard about the future. Predicting a future thousands of years from now is hard enough. Predicting one just forty years away is very much harder. Looking back at, say, 1969, who then managed to predict the world of 2009? The Internet? Smartphones? The collapse of the Soviet Union? The Moon, never visited again after the Apollo missions?
We are living in the future, right now, today. Many people alive now can barely grasp the technologies we are using, the science that makes them possible, and the social changes that are upon us. Last year, people spent $5 billion in virtual worlds like Second Life. The US President, Barak Obama, has only slightly more Twitter followers than Oprah. One thing you can be sure about 2050 is that there will be technologies around then that we just haven’t imagined yet.
So if the kids in this book are jumping back in time to get their kicks, if a fusion reactor that can run a small town can fit on the back of a pick up truck, if radical, fundamentalist, religious fanatics are back in the Whitehouse, don’t be too surprised. Your grand-kids will no doubt take it all for granted.
In this blog, I plan to talk about some the reasearch I did for the book. I want to talk about the characters, where they come from, and what might happen to them next. I’d love to discuss some of the choices I made as to where the next forty years will take us. I’d really like to hear your thoughts on what the world of TimeSplash might really be like.
