Science Fiction Prototyping. Brian David Johnson

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      FIGURE 1: The five-step process.

THE FIVE STEPS

      The following five steps break down the SF prototyping process into sequential accomplishable steps. They are:

       Step 1: Pick Your Science and Build Your World

      First, you should pick the technology, science or issue you want to explore with the prototype. Next, set up the world of your story and introduce us to the people and locations. You can answer very simple questions like who are the main characters and where will the action take place. You will also want to begin to explore an explanation of the technology in your topic.

       Step 2: The Scientific Inflection Point

      The introduction of the “science” or technology you are looking to explore in the prototype.

       Step 3: Ramifications of the Science on People

      Explore the implications and ramifications of your science on the world you have described in Step 1. What effect does the technology have? How does it change people lives? Does it create a new danger? What needs to be done to fix the problem?

       Step 4: The Human Inflection Point

      What did we learn from seeing the technology placed into a realistic setting? What is needed to happen to fix the problem? Does the technology need to be modified? Is there a new area for experimentation or research?

       Step 5: What Did We Learn?

      Explore the possible implications, solution or lessons learned from Step 4 and its human implications.

Step 1: Pick Your Science and Build Your World

      Step 1 is probably the most important and most time consuming of all the steps. It is here that you will pick your topic and you will build the world where you will place your SF prototype.

      The first thing to do in the process is to figure out what piece of science or technology you want to explore. This can be taken from any number of places. Many universities and teams already have research and technology they would like to expand. In Chapter 2, the story The Were-Tigers of Belum was written by the scientists who were actually doing the development of the sensor network for environmental monitoring. They developed their SF prototype as a tool to expand their thinking about how the sensor network could be used and what issues they might face as the technology was deployed. They also had some fun bringing back the mythical tigers as a reminder of the environmental issues that are currently affecting Malaysia.

      If you are not currently working on a research and development project, you can review magazines and journals for your particular area of interest. It is usually more exciting to pick a piece of emerging research or science because the implications and effects of it are most likely not widely understood. Another more general place to look are popular science magazines like Scientific American, New Scientist, Nature, and Popular Science.

      The goal is to pick a topic that grabs your imagination and gets you thinking about what might happen when people start using it.

      When planning your SF prototype, you should begin by considering future versions of the technology you have selected to explore from you topic. You can begin by asking yourself some basic and entertaining questions:

      • What are the implications of the mass adoption of the technology?

      • What is the worst thing that could go wrong and how would it affect the people and locations in the story?

      • What is the best thing that could happen and how would it better the lives of the people and locations of the story?

      • If this technology was in an average home, how would it actually work?

      Once you have started getting some ideas from these questions, you can begin to brainstorm one or more potential broader contextual issues raised by the technology in question. As you imagine the plot of your story, it is important to remember that you are placing your topic or idea in a real world. Now, granted we are talking about science fiction or your real world might be far into the future, but regardless, the world must feel real. It is still governed by the laws and logic of science. It is also important to remember that this world that you are creating needs to be populated by real people. These real people will have real problems that have nothing to do with your topic. In the future, people will still not want to go to a boring job. In the future, people will still fall in love and some will have their hearts broken. In the future, we still will feel too lazy to take out the trash.

      The setting for most science fiction prototypes needs to be the near future. As we extrapolate out the scientific topics, the goal is to place them in a world that we know and one that will be useful to study and explore the effects of the technology. Creating a realistic background for the near future is essential.

      Even a best seller like Dean R. Koontz recognized that creating a plausible near future was not an easy task.

       Because most science fiction takes place in the future, the backgrounds are largely products of the writers’ imaginations. The future can be researched only to a limited extent, for when it comes to saying exactly what the years ahead hold for us, even the most well-informed scientists can offer only conjecture. The SF (science fiction) writer’s vision of the future must be detailed and believable, or ultimately the reader will not believe anything about the story—not the characters, the motivation, or the plot.

      The near future. Structuring a story background of near future—twenty, thirty, or forty years from now—is in some way more difficult than creating an entire alien planet in some impossibly distant age, for the near-future background cannot be wholly a product of the imagination. The writer must conduct extensive research to discover what engineer and scientists project for every aspect of future life. From that data, the author then extrapolates a possible world of tomorrow, one which might logically rise out of the base of the future which we are building today. (Koontz, 1981)

      This is good news! As Koontz points out, it is important that the writer of a near-future story understands what engineers and scientists are working on and projecting for the future. In the case of science fiction prototypes, much of this is accomplished when the topic has been selected. The fictional near-future world of the story/prototype is dictated by the actual science of the topic.

Step 2: The Scientific Inflection Point

      Now that you have picked your science and you have your idea, it is time to see what happens when that science (or technology or topic) is placed into your world.

      When doing this, it is important to focus specifically on the people and systems in your world. The inflection point is not about the science itself (you should explore that in Step one). Step 2 is all about the effect that this new science or technology might have on the daily lives, governments and systems in your story.

Step 3: Ramifications of the Science on People

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