WILL YOUR WRITING CREATE the NEXT GREAT TECH INVENTION?

By El Ochiis

I wrote a short story that took place in the 1850’s, in which one of the characters possessed an advanced, technological object enclosed in a rare metal. An editor, who read my piece, commented that I had created a future, technological invention. Inventing was not in my thought process when I wrote the story; I only imagined making the events in the story believable, to do that, I had to create this object. 

The editor’s position was that our most recent technology had been invented because of ideas gleaned from stories. I meant, what if she was right? She’s an editor, she was always right.   

A few days after our conversation, I got stuck in an airport and decided to re-read Fahrenheit 451. Ray Bradbury had predicted, in this book, the techy toy that I inserted in my ears to listen to music - headphones. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only writer to honor him. Here’s hoping, however, his other predictions, made in Fahrenheit 451 were less accurate.

  

Logging onto the internet to find another flight, I gave a thumbs up to Mr. Mark Twain, who was one of the first persons to dream about the possibilities of a globally connected community, in his 1898 short story, from the London Times of 1904, where Twain introduced readers to something called a “telelectroscope” that used the phone system to create a worldwide network for sharing information. No, Al Gore, you did not invent the internet; the writer who wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did.

  

The editor wanted to Skype; I preferred video chatting on iMessage. Hold the phones, this concept was described in E.M. Foster’s novel: The Machine Stops: “But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her.” Skype; iMessage – just call Foster. 

I decided to watch: 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie from 1968, on my iPad Pro. There was a scene where astronauts watched and read from a pair of flat-screen tablets, called “Newspads”, which Stanley Kubrick developed alongside Arthur C. Clark’s novel – looked strikingly similar to Apple’s iPad. Creepy, huh? 

I edited that piece and uploaded it to a blog. Hold your kilobytes, Vladimir Odoyevsky, whose 1835 Novel: Year 4338, described houses that would be: “connected by means of magnetic telegraphs..." Each house would publish a daily journal or newsletter…," and share it with the world. Yes, that would be blogging.

Bill Gates; Steve Jobs; tech valley – no, it is the lonely writer using his or her imagination – if we writers could just figure out how to get those ideas in front of venture capitalists who specialize in providing capital to tech innovations of the future.

What new technology or historical prediction will you, the next writer of fiction create?