Retro Futures: “Redcrosse” and the view from 1997 and 2011 - Bonus

Yesterday, April 27, 2023 was when the plot of my 2011 near future dystopian novel began… what a weird feeling.

I’ve written before about Retro Futures, by which I mean looking at how the future looked to science fiction writers in previous eras, measuring what they got right and what they got wrong, and then thinking through what that means about where we are.

Any utopian and dystopian fiction is a commentary on the era when an author writes it, rather than just about a "what if?" future the author imagines. The roots of the word "utopia" literally mean "no place," and the roots of "dystopia" literally mean "bad place." That's not a lot of hope.

Yesterday my own dystopia moved from future into retro future.

In Redcrosse, my near-future dystopian novel that came out in 2011, the high-speed plot started on April 27, 2023. I had the inspiration for one key action sequence in the book on a train ride from Norwich to London in the summer of 1997 and then worked on the book for years until it came out in 2011.

A few months back, I did a deep dive into what I got right and what I got wrong. One thing I got right was how pandemics so utterly transform life, creating haves and have nots when it comes to disease, health care, and resources. In Redcrosse, the transmission of the different "CyberPlagues" (intolerances to technology) remains elusive, which means that emotionally it feels a lot like the early months of COVID when we weren't sure how it was spreading.

Back in 1997, the pre-HIV drugs AIDS epidemic was still a fresh memory, as was the memory of how terrifying it was to wonder what forms of contact (kissing, sitting on a toilet seat) might mean you caught the disease. Will making out with this person kill me?

That was the emotional matrix for when I wrote Redcrosse, but the difference between the CyberPlagues and AIDS was that the CyberPlagues affected everybody from the start, where AIDS had seemed at first to be a plague affecting gay men only (it never was and still isn't). So in that I anticipated COVID.

Another thing I got right was the power of data and how information asymmetries lead to oligarchy. But I mistook who would have the data and become the oligarchs. Instead of digital platforms like Google and Facebook and Amazon it was fused credit card companies and health care companies.

You can read the deep dive here: The World in April, 2023.

Yesterday, it felt eerie and surreal when realized that the thing I had imagined as far off in the distance was now in the past. In 1997, when I first started thinking about Redcrosse, I was still in my 20s and still an academic working on a Ph.D. thesis about Shakespeare. I wasn't a futurist or a technology researcher yet. The Matrix hadn't been released, although Neuromancer and Snowcrash and other CyberPunk were around. La Profesora and I were already married, but we weren't parents.

At that time, I had not yet run across the Bill Gates quote that is the smartest thing I've ever read about technology and change: "People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten." (From The Road Ahead.)

By 2011, when the book came out, I was no longer only an academic. I was solidly working in digital media as a writer, editor and event programmer. I had new academic ties as a researcher with the Center for the Digital Future, watching technology transform life around us at an astonishing rate. Redcrosse was only 12 years out then, and it was already becoming an alternate future rather than a predicted future, a process that ended yesterday. My daughter was 10 and my son was six.

Redcrosse is still a solid technology adventure story—you don't have to take my word for it: read the reviews—that has a lot to say about where we are going. It's free on Kindle Unlimited and cheap as a digital download if you don't subscribe.

It's weird when something that happens without you doing anything changes your identity, like when your sibling has a kid and you become an uncle or aunt. That's what happened to Redcrosse yesterday: it went from near future dystopia to retro future. How odd.

Yesterday was also my younger brother Evan’s birthday, which is how I came to start Redcrosse on this date in the first place. Happy Birthday, Evan (again)!

I was more focused on Evan than on Redcrosse, but I’m lucky to have David Daniel as a lifelong friend who messaged me “Happy Redcrosse Day!” first thing. Thank you, David!—both for the message and for reading Redcrosse when it first came out.

Thanks for reading this bonus issue. See you Sunday.