HN Explorer

Ask HN: What technology and adjacent world would work in literary fiction?

2 points by blockwriter ↗ HN
My recent experience coding makes me wonder about the possibilities of including a well-researched depiction of the genesis of a certain technology in a work of literary fiction. Is there any programming language, hardware revolutions, or companies that you think could work as a central element of literary fiction? These technologies run our lives, but I find them stunningly difficult to depict. I have to wonder if I am simply looking in the wrong place. I wonder how Tolstoy would write about today’s world and the forces that drive it.

5 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 22.7 ms ] thread
drakonka
Oh wow, I think the possibilities of working modern technology into fiction in interesting ways are endless. The only thing is, you'll need to decide how accurate the story needs to be. You COULD do a fully historically accurate portrayal of a company, person, technology, etc. Or you could make it a mix of true and fictionalized events _inspired by_ a real thing, but not married to historical accuracy.

Random idea that just popped to mind:

The reinvention of Microsoft (or "Seemingly-Outdated-Fictional-Megacompany-X") as an open-source, progressive tech pioneer. I don't know the details of the history here, and I'd make up a different name for the company to give me more leeway even if I wanted to keep details as accurate as I reasonably could.

The story of a company (Tinyhard Corporation) whose founders viewed open-source as a threat to their company's very existence. A scourge upon the world! Or rather, maybe a story from the perspective of a long-time employee (or group of employees) who started off fully believing their company's skepticism toward open source software.

Through their eyes we witness things like the Halloween (or "Christmas", for Tinyhard) documents and other internal communication about their employer's anti-open-source stance. Maybe the main character is intricately involved in putting into motion some of the company's tactics to squelch the rise of open-source software?

But then something happens (an "inciting incident"), during the course of our main character's efforts against open source on behalf of the company. The employee or group start becoming converted toward open source acceptance. These characters can be entirely fictional, showing us true (or inspired-by-true) events of the company through their eyes. Maybe the employee meets a rebel who they first see as an open-source-loving, good-for-nothin', irresponsible hacker who doesn't understand how bad open-source is and a love interest develops that also surfaces questions about everything they believed about their fight against open-source.

Maybe as they are converted, they slowly start advocating and eventually fighting for open source internally, sowing dissent (resulting of course in conflict and a threat to their position).

The culmination of this character's efforts results in Tinyhard's first ever open-source release: Tinyhard Intaller XML (TiX).

That can be the end of the story: the first step toward a brand new world. An ending of our character taking one small step for them, one giant leap for the future of Tinyhard.

blockwriter
I agree that the possibilities are endless. The difficulty, for me, comes in bridging the linguistic legacy of the literary canon, with all of its caveats and forms, to the world of coding. You’ve (very helpfully) identified a narrative structure that revolves around the transition to open source. The question then becomes whether or not this is a more vital narrative than any good vs. evil tale writ large. It will remain very difficult to make the character’s computer based vocation more engaging than orcs or jedis, or what have you.

I realize that this quibble is secondary to my original question. Consider that Joyce’s Ulysses marvelously captures man’s transition to modernity with a highly realized literary style. Technology has super-saturated our experience, and it seems to me that the language required to describe contemporary technological experience, if it is even worth capturing, has to be a narrative, linguistic, and stylistic masterstroke. But this is what makes it so frustrating. There do seem to be endless possibilities, but there is far too little cross-platform interoperability between technology and literature.

drakonka
I think I see what you mean, it's just that to me the language of orcs, elves, or other fantasy concepts is necessarily any more relatable or compelling than the language of code, technology, and corporations in a modern (or futuristic) world.

My opinion as a programmer is obviously biased here, but I salivate at the thought of a cool story about coders. Have you seen Halt and Catch Fire? They managed to capture bits and pieces of computer history in a very compelling way. There was no lack of programming and techy language, but also no lack of conflict, drama, and difficult human choices. It was compelling in a totally different way than the setting and characters of something like LotR. Maybe I am overly optimistic, but I just don't see why that same feeling can't be captured in a written work rather than a TV show.

What about the myriad of existing works of science fiction that feature tech concepts heavily in their narratives? It might be futuristic technology, but I think the overall feeling of "techy language" would be similar. Or speculative fiction like Prey by Michael Crichton, or even something like Disclosure by the same, which from what I can remember is set at a hardware company?

blockwriter
My instinct is to go small. One idea I had was for a child neglected by their careerist parent to go through their parent's code, amending what they cannot understand to be a love letter of sorts that completely ruins the codebase. In that way, you could present the actual code and iterate through the child's perspective as they destroy it.

I need to read Crichton. He gets a lot of praise, even among writers of literary fiction that I know, for producing quality work that is augmented significantly by the subject matter. The distinction between mass market fiction about technology and the kind of fiction that envelops technology might be better illustrated by a simile. The former is like an article about a tech company. The latter is like that company's API.

mikewarot
Imagine that the NSA realizes that capability based security might make their jobs much more difficult once they get a good look at the Burroughs B5000 in 1961. They decide to squelch it through a number of covert channels, resulting in the stupid checkbox to enable location services we have to day being called "capabilities" instead of the real deal.

Or the Atomic Energy Agency decides that Thorium based nuclear reactors would make proliferation free nuclear energy too cheap to meter, for real, and that would cut into the profits of the energy sector.

Or that Tesla had a means to tap into the Terawatt of energy stored in the ionosphere from the charge of solar winds, and JP Morgan was interested in selling copper wire instead.

There are many, MANY different ways things could be different, some of them actually plausible.