Time-Warp Techno-Thrillers
I’m reading a book called Gridiron at the moment, by Philip Kerr. It was published in the mid-90s, and is a thriller set in a “smart building”, stuffed with supercomputers which run an artificial intelligence.
I love reading stuff like this that tries desperately to be super-up-to-date and spot-on-authentic, but ends up quickly dating itself. Another great example is Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, his office sexual politics thriller, which has ultra-fast CD ROM drives as its techno background. Mind you, almost any Crichton thriller is good for techno time-warp, and I love seeing the Apple Quadras in the Jurassic Park film. 68040 chips ahoy!
The CD ROM features strongly in Gridiron, too. The security system in the building is supposed to record onto them (”They hold 700 megabytes.”), but the machine delivered was the wrong spec - only double-speed, instead of the mind-bogglingly fast quad speed. Even better than this, the security system itself uses Video8 cameras. Quality.
It’s sweet, really. If you want to write about technology without getting out of date, you basically have to invent something that seems impossible or outlandish. As Arthur C Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don’t think quad-speed CD ROM drives were magical for very long, even in 1996.
I would actually love to write a techno-thriller in which all the technology is 10 years out of date. I would set it in a school.
All true. I particularly like watching old sci-fi from the 70’s, where every programme make thought that tape decks were computers.
[...] blogged elsewhere about the pleasures of reading an out-of-date techno-thriller like this. Gridiron was published in [...]