Since I'm gettin' comfy on this forum, I might as well introduce people to a concept I've been refining for four or five odd years now— "futuristic realism" and "slice of tomorrow". It's probably the most boring sci-fi subgenre, but at the same time I think it's one of the most necessary. We're clearly moving into a world that is all but identical to science fiction. Some argue we're already there; others say it's still beyond us but elements of sci-fi have crept into modern life. I'm in the former camp. My belief is that, at least when people consciously attempt to make it so, real life is indistinguishable from a sci-fi story. Thing is, when people think of how their lives are sci-fi, they can never really get a good grasp on it because of the cold fact that sci-fi is, like fantasy, an inherently escapist genre. It's the only one of the two where the fantastical devices can actually come true, but outside of diamond-hard sci-fi, the genre is used to either escape from real life problems or take real-life problems and tackle them in fantastic ways. And that's fine. It's just that there's so much sentiment across the 'net about how people lament "living in this dank little apartment with a Roomba" while there are others in the world who have bionic limbs, casually interact with artificially intelligent killer robots, trade and steal bitcoins with mercenaries and drug dealers, and/or fly in passenger drones through and past quasi-cyberpunk cityscapes. My reaction: "you're still living in a sci-fi world." Most people aren't noir-hearted cyberpunks or grizzled cyberaugmented detectives or space marines. Most people will never be any of those things. Not even most of the rich. Most people will never be thrust into any situation where they'll have to become any of these things. And yet we're still beginning to live in a world indistinguishable from sci-fi regardless. That's what I was aiming for with this concept, hence why I've come up with the other tag "slice of tomorrow" to go along with "futuristic realism". Literary realism was always (for better or for worse) obsessed with the mundane plights of the common man rather than the hero (or antihero), where the climax of a story could be something as humdrum as opening a letter. Futuristic realism isn't any different. It just has robots and cybernetics to go along with it. The cool thing about this is that it doesn't matter if I or anyone else write a story with these conventions in mind— it'll happen anyway! Just like how smartphones and smartwatches et al have gradually infiltrated modern realistic/literary fiction, someday we'll be reading stories casually featuring AI and utility/service robots. I'd just prefer to jump the gun.
In a manner, yes. I just realized that I never discussed the visual aspect to the style. That's how it began, after all, from my desire to find "photoauthentic" images of sci-fi technology. Nothing so touched up and artistic and trying to force the fact that it's The Future™. That, or those instances in real life that seem ripped straight from a sci-fi movie. Like these images and gifs: I actually have three subreddits dedicated to all this, but two of them are for the visual style. https://www.reddit.com/r/SciFiRealism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/FuturisticRealism https://www.reddit.com/r/SliceOfTomorrow/
I've been meaning to write up some old plots I created a couple years back. I'll prolly get around to that in a few hours. Actually, here's a new one that just cropped up: One of the proposed solutions towards the question of whose lives autonomous vehicles will prioritize is that the driver should be given an "ethical knob" to flip. This is put forward in many AVs, but in 2025, this leads to a terrible accident as a young child is struck and killed. The parents of that child then press charges on the AV "driver", claiming he's responsible for murder. At the very least, voluntary manslaughter. The rider of the AV claims that it wasn't his fault, that the AV was marketed as being completely safe. Depending on how "hard" or "soft" I could make it, the story could take multiple directions. Futuristic realism would have it explore the consequences of who's responsible, perhaps even entertaining if it's possible to charge the developers or even the algorithms behind the car. Because if we trust our cars to drive us safely, that means that the technology behind them must be at least in the primordial stages of understanding right and wrong. But if that's impossible, then who's responsible? No one wants to say it was the child's fault for playing in the road. Was it the parents? Was it the driver? But isn't the driver not actually the driver? He chose to turn the Ethical Knob to "self-preservation", did he not? Was it the developers of the AV and the Ethical Knob? It's discussion of these experiment and futuristic technologies in a real-world setting. Something familiar. Slice of tomorrow would be softer than that, doing more to follow one or the other characters and their responses to the overarching drama without focusing on the sociotechnological debate beyond a few chance discussions. In which case, the story is more "a man grapples with horrible guilt after killing (?) a child" or "a parent grapples with anger and depression after their child dies and they don't know how to move on", and the technological aspect takes more of a backseat. A pretty damn important backseat because the story wouldn't work without the existence of AVs and the AIs necessary to make them work, but the backseat nonetheless. Right now, that's the story as it is in my head. I don't think it'll be resolved because it's just such a fascinating question. And it's not even purely or necessarily science fiction— the Ethical Knob is actually a proposed setting for AVs. It would be a neat way to explore the consequences of advanced technology, even if the consequences aren't explicitly good or bad. Way back in 2015 (around Halloween, IIRC), I decided to do an experiment. Do a journal. Hour-by-hour. It details my life. The only catch is that I have to imagine that I'm living that life with an artificially intelligent humanoid utility robot. Things I do (e.g. getting the mail, cleaning the litterbox, cooking fried rice and potstickers), I may or may not claim the robot did instead. How would my attitude shift? If I brought that robot to my uni, what would it do alongside me? If people didn't freak out on sight of it but just accepted it like how they accept smartphones, what would that day look like? Would I be more daring to do things now that I know I have some extra brains and muscle behind me? Would I use that robot like I would a personal little fetcher? Etc. etc. TLDR: Yeah, Black Mirror and Electric Dreams.
Perhaps im crazy but I would in an ideal world have a law requreing the majority of legal disputes regarding SDCs to go to the manufacturer as it would both incentivize better cars after all the passanger did almost nothing to that relates in any way to the crash and lets say passanger was the one who died he would probably have his family sue so the ethical lever turns into more preference over any sort of legal mechanism and all responsibility is placed on the manufacturer. Of course law goes on a case by case basis so these would be general guidelines but i feel this would be most effictive
I feel like the designers of the Ipad bots should really work on there coloring and design they look like one of the old mac books
Possibly my favorite slice of tomorrow games is Va1-hal-A or whatever its called where stuff is clearly changing but it is given the impression that it fits into the world its just a normal thing yes there are always new things but the same goes for our world it really helped me imagine what it could be like in the more robotic future Also one of my favorite examples of near future sci fi is the Iphone 10 years ago it was some crazy new technology and now its incredibly rare to see someone without one 77% of people in america have smartphones things that let me remind you let you toutch a screen and interact with a virtual world something that dosent exist except in information think of that and then think of humans as near animals banging rocks together to start a fire.
I have two ways of thinking about slice of tomorrow fiction. 1: take Sarah, Plain and Tall. Now add robots, automated machinery, drones, smartphones, maybe even a hyperloop. 2: take The Fault in Our Stars. Now bring it back to 1962. Don't change a single thing about the story either; the denizens of 1962 simply have to make do with trying to figure out what smartphones and texting and social media and chemotherapy are.
