Speaking of science fiction and iPads

I recently read Fuzzy Nation, John Scalzi's so-called "reboot," based on current sensibilities, of H. Beam Piper's novel Little Fuzzy. I didn't like the new novel for a whole lot of reasons, and I laughed especially at the parts where the protagonist, whom both Piper and Scalzi have named Jack Holloway, uses a device which Scalzi calls an "infopanel."

Uh, hello, Mr. Scalzi? Did you mentally slip back into the 1970's when you wrote this "reboot"? Scalzi's version of Holloway, like Piper's, prospects for a unique kind of gemstone on an exoplanet, which means that the story has to take place many centuries into "the future," though Scalzi doesn't explain the part of the backstory about how interstellar travel supposedly works and how it can get people to exoplanets within their normal lifetimes . Yet his character's most technologically advanced device in this civilization resembles the tablet PC's we can pick up now at businesses like Walmart or Best Buy.

On top of that, the medicine of this "future" society hasn't advanced appreciably, so that people still age and die - though in fairness he shares this assumption with Piper.

Needless to say, I found both aspects of the novel underwhelming. Michio Kaku in his nonfiction book Physics of the Future, by contrast, postulates that by the year 2100 we'll have implanted computers, or at least ones we can wear like contact lenses - and that idea sounds more "futuristic" than Scalzi's portrayal of people in an even more remote "future" lugging around tablets. And, Kaku forecasts, medicine will start to make inroads into this mortality nuisance by 2100; in fact, Kaku tells a story about the life of an ordinary guy in the year 2100. One day, while discussing health matters with his medical AI which presents itself as a human-looking avatar, Ordinary Guy in the year 2100 asks it how he should structure his life now that he doesn't have the traditional signposts based on our biological development and decline. Why, if he doesn't age appreciably and won't likely become demented or otherwise disabled in the indefinite future, when should he retire?

I laughed at this as well, but I laughed benevolently. At least Kaku has started to get the right idea, though his silence about cryonics in the book may imply something about cryonics' current reputation as a "futuristic" technology; or at least it implies that Kaku doesn't take cryonics seriously for some reason. Nonetheless, cryonicists have discussed and written extensively about the problems of living a really, really long time, now going back nearly 50 years. You can find much of this literature on the internet.

And getting back to updating H. Beam Piper's novel, I have some ideas different from Scalzi's about how to do that. In my version of a Fuzzy novel, I would keep more of Holloway's personality and world view, which Scalzi essentially throws away, especially Piper's self-reliance to a fault which Piper writes into his heroes. I would also show Holloway as a radical life-extender, though I'd want to avoid making him too much like Lazarus Long (an understandable temptation, since Piper often writes like the poor man's Robert Heinlein); perhaps Holloway mines sunstones and lives frugally to save money for his next rejuvenation. But he would definitely use some technologies which signal a "futuristic" world, including a virtual computer interface in his eye which helps him to identify geological formations likely to contain sunstones, as well as medical upgrades which give him enhanced intelligence and superior stamina, coordination, strength and recuperative powers. These enhancements would definitely make him more than an ordinary hard case for anyone or anything which tries to fuck with him.