Futures in Pieces by Esau Kessler

I love having fun, insightful posts. So today, I have Esau Kessler, a sci-fi writer and just an all around cool guy. He and I first made contact last year at the Idaho Book Extravaganza, and it was cool hanging out and talking with him. Since he’s a sci-fi buff, I invited him on the website to talk about what the future looks like or may look like. Hope you dig it!

 

EK: Let me introduce myself (If Estevan didn’t enough), I am a creative that has worked in commercial design for over 20 years. Currently I am completing a science fiction novel called “Edan” which is a story about a young coder who has his identity stolen by the devil, or a devil, or someone of evil design. The coder figures out how to hack DNA, which allows an island of clones to be created, and the devil and a host of digital demons go about destroying it to hack their own island of “creatures”. One of the clones is a 13 year old paraplegic girl who holds the keys to the whole plot. I live in Idaho, and I like Creed. There, we are now comrades.

What I want to talk about, and yes, I am totally just spitballin’ here folks:

It has been an interesting experience writing about science fiction these last 4 years, while real life becomes more full of science fiction than what I am writing (Perhaps I should start writing ‘fantasy’!). From real underground clandestine organizations like “Anonymous”, killer drones patrolling our skies, new digital currencies like “bitcoin” that threaten to upend the way we trade money, to quantum physics that prove quantum entanglement and that the world is not what it seems.

The future is here, and it is getting much more evenly distributed.

I cannot pinpoint the exact moment when things changed. The paradigm shift when things went askew and the future got here. But I do remember “ho-humming” Terminator 3: Rise OF the Machines (the one with the female Terminatrix) in 2003, as much of the technology was current day: military robots, air force intranets, it somehow became merely an action movie, which gave the film less meaning, and less value. That was my first clue.

And that is what I want to talk about: clues. Science fiction doesn’t have to be about the future, it can be fantasy or alternative future or past. But some of the really good sci-fi is good in my opinion because what it gives me: hints about what tomorrow might be like. And we all want that. Here we are on a planet zooming 67,000 MPH around a ball of nuclear fire, all held together by nothing, while our atoms shake and vibrate, and the world is filled with chaos and the unknown. Good heavens, it is a miracle anything ever gets done. While this can cause a case of profound and crushing fear, most of us find a little mundane corner to eek out our existence, and want only little tastes of what tomorrow might hold.

There was a time I wanted to know the future, but after more thought, I became aware that not knowing, was far more desirable and interesting. It begs mystery and adventure.

So I have settled with clues. Subtle hints, glimpses, and beams of revelation. This is what we all want. And this is what good literature offers. Authors like George Orwell who told us of a today that would be a dark police state with mind control and a boot kicking a human face forever 75 years ago, while Aldous Huxley painted a “Brave New World” of indulgence, pleasure, and apathy. Separately they were both wrong, but jointly, quite accurate about the now. How did they do that? Some of us just see things differently. One person sees an empty cardboard box, another questions what is inside, and another wonders if it’s a cat alive and dead at the same time.

One of my favorite films “Minority Report” produced by Steven Spielberg, actually had a conference of hand selected scientists, creatives, writers, and artists. Shaman who shook the tea leaves and scattered the bones. Now 10 years later they were amazingly accurate. Currently Homeland Security is working on it’s FAST system (Future Attribute Screening Technology) that measures body temperature, heart rate, and body language to predict what you might be thinking about doing before you do it. Or as Jon Anderton called it “PreCrime”.

As a creative generalist I always see things differently. At first I thought there was something wrong with me, but in time I have learned to know and love the way my brain works. How I process the information I receive and the data I spit out. I am often dead wrong about things, and don’t pretend to know the future, and avoid predicting outcomes. However, there is this uncanny ability I have to see the big picture and come up with original ideas that prove themselves to be true in some sense. It’s like having a useless superpower, I can see slightly into the future, but not quite enough to do anything about it. (Which is far better than being partially bulletproof or having healing punches, BTW.)

Recently I wrote “Aberrations and glitch are common to our digital experience. There is almost an analog layer that manifests itself in the zeros and ones. Yet, we march on, convincing ourselves that computing is reliable, linear, predictable and without foibles. To be trusted with our finances, our homes, our children, and our

very lives.”  This is a generalist statement that assumes you know the meaning of ‘glitch’, passively suggesting the sinister, speaking to mankind’s love of technology, and challenging it. Who does that? People like us. I say ‘us’, in that if you are still reading, you identify, and have not yet written me off as a dreamer and incanter of worthless spells, who vomits the obviously unknowable and irrelevant.

In my story “Edan” I write about an augmented reality layer of virtual life, that plays out in our daily lives, feeding and stealing from our reality, and I mention one character’s obsession with mortality. Counting the days until his demise. Will tomorrow hold a deeper more vivid grasp on obsession, and enable a hyper-dystopia of human neurosis? Or will we learn to use technology passively with a focus on reality and simple human values? I cannot say, but I can suggest that what you’re thinking now and the subsequent actions you take will influence that future one way or the other. So beware of the powerful forces that lay deep within you. They might produce the unexpected.

Esau Kessler

EV: Thanks, Esau for coming onto the site and rockin’ the blog scene. You hit us with some serious insight. To all those of you intrigued by Esau and his work, go stalk his website. http://www.edanbook.com/

Til next time, stay fly and spread the fire!

evega

twitter: @estevanvega; facebook: we are arson