When fiction becomes fact: 6 novels that predicted the future.

A friend of mine recently bought an Amazon Echo. If you're not familiar, it's a voice-activated device that can do everything from report the news to order your next shipment of toilet paper.  All you have to do is say "Alexa, order Charmin toilet paper" and she will place the order through Amazon. No pesky keyboards needed. You can even connect her to home devices including lights, AC, TV, and the garage door for an all-in-one voice-activated hands-free living experience.

If you're a science fiction reader, this probably doesn't sound that novel. Authors have been writing about voice activated technology for years.  Which strikes me as pretty incredible.

Here are a few of my favorite Sci-Fi stories that accurately predicted future technology.

 MT Anderson's FEED

In feed, people access the internet through implanted microchips. But before implants became all the rage, people used glasses very similar to Google's now defunct Google Glass.

Orson Scott Card's ENDER'S GAME

The characters in Ender's Game use a tablet computer device that is eerily similar to today's iPad.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE by Beth Revis

In this series, food is deliver by an in-room wall system, appearing as if by magic. While we haven't quite invented the wall-delivery technology yet, a Barcelona-based company announced plans to launch a 3D printer that will print food...which will make something like this very feasible in the not-to-distant future.

UNDER THE NEVER SKY TRILOGY by Veronica Rossi

Characters living in the enclosed city of Reverie wear biometric suits to monitor their health, regulate their body temperatures and other science-y stuff. While we're note quite to the suit faze yet, an SF-based company has developed a band aid-like device that will be able to do things very similar to Rossi's imagined suits. It can even measure your calorie intake as you eat.

George Orwell's 1984

Orson's classic imagines a society where everyone is monitored by Big Brother...which bares a striking resemblance to many of the privacy discussions of late around data ownership.

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

In Douglas Adam's novel, travelers use a device that can translate any alien language instantaneously.  Turns out, there's now an app for that.

What about you? Read any fiction that turned into fact?

YA Book Pick: CINDER by Marissa Meyer

Once a month, we choose an outstanding YA book to review. We want to spotlight books of interest to aspiring writers, as well as highlight some of our favorite books and authors!

This month's Book Pick is CINDER by Marissa Meyer.

Synopsis (from Goodreads): Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl.

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

First Line: "The screw through Cinder's ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle."

This first line gives you an immediate impression of the main character. She obviously has something physically different about her, or she wouldn't have a screw through her ankle. The author also plants the idea that Cinder is poor by mentioning that the screw is rusted. It makes me want to read on and find out why!

Highlights: Although "cyborg Cinderella" is a good enough hook for just about anyone, this book is also a good example of the dystopian genre. It's set in the future, after a world war has devastated much of the world and completely changed political boundaries. The author did a good job of avoiding the dreaded infodump, instead doling out bits of information throughout the book that kept me hooked and interested.

The main character is mechanically inclined and very competent, which I liked a lot. No damsel in distress here. The romantic plotline is also well-crafted. The protagonists' attraction to each other is believable, and so are the reasons they are kept apart.

The book ends on a dramatic cliffhanger, which made me want to pick up the next book immediately. From the synopses, it looks like the other books in Meyer's series each follow different fairy-tale characters who end up interacting with Cinder and each other. This seems like an intriguing way to do a series that might be more interesting than just following the same character throughout multiple novels.

A Good Read For: Writers of fairy-tale retellings, this would be a great read for you. The author loosely follows the Cinderella story, but she adds so much of her own spin that I honestly forgot about it after a while. She did an excellent job of blending just enough of the familiar with interesting new concepts to keep the reader hooked.

Villain of the Month: Society

Image of Snowden from article linked below

 Sales of 1984, George Orwell's classic dystopian work, soared recently when Edward Snowden outed himself as the source who revealed that the U.S. government was collecting the metadata on all of its citizens. With such an evolution of technology in the past decade forcing "big brother" questions into the collective conscious of all of us, it's no wonder that dystopian novels have been front and center of the YA world for years now, and that Snowden's reveal has given him a cult-hero status amongst many Americans. 

So...while we've been hearing for a few seasons that publishers aren't looking for dystopian anymore, I can't imagine that they wouldn't start snatching up a few more now to be paired with all of the inevitable Snowden bios and "ripped from the headlines" stories and I think it just might be the time to take that maligned dystopian you have out of the drawer and start querying it again. This has also given me the opportunity to start deconstructing the key elements of society-as-villain in a dystopian novel.

* Government names dehumanize: Aside from a  singular key leader who may be hyper-humanized with a very specific name, usually the naming is vague. Numbers or titles are often popular, as are familial relations (brother, father, etc.) in order to strip away individuality/humanity though the familial titles do manage to maintain more warmth. It is always easier to hate a nameless thing.

* Protagonist names are often very humanizing: As we are meant to be sympathetic with the protagonist, the protagonist often has a very meaningful name. Often he/she is named after a relative, something beautiful in nature, or is simply unique (but often familiar sounding nonetheless).  

* Clinical terminology is dehumanizing, but also appealing: All forms of distancing language are in high use in a dystopian as at the core of a dystopian work is usually a deep-seated desire for life to be more clean and predictable than it is.

* Society is not a singular entity: With shared responsibility comes shared blame and it can be infuriating to not have a singular person on which to lay said blame. The lack of singular enemy enhances a sense of powerlessness and "raises the stakes". Often in a novel a singular entity will be given blame by the end. In real life a few singular persons are "thrown to the wolves" to receive the punishment for the collective entity. 

* Passive sentence construction/ overuse of "to be" verbs creates a sense of powerlessness: These enhance the clinical nature of the work and are highly distancing from the reader. Great dystopian writers often jar us by contrasting the cold distance of passive voice with the vital alive-ness of a protagonist who thinks and speaks in active verbs.

* The core desire of the society is often good, or at least began that way: While some dystopian societies have their starting point with a con artist who never intended good (though his rhetoric was almost certainly appealing to the good in his society), most were able to come into being by reaching to the citizens' sense of a greater good. Often the pattern is that men of the society gave over freedom in order to have a cleaner/safer/longer life, and then paid the consequences when society felt the old dictum "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."