Jem Tugwell’s debut novel Proximity is out today from Serpentine Books – a science fiction crime novel that posits a world where technology has become too prevalent. In this short piece, he discusses the connections between world-building for his novel and his own background in investment management…
I built a world that I would hate in live in. Thankfully it’s a fictional world, and like now it has both positives and negatives, but I worry that the world of Proximity is coming. And soon.
It is my personal sense of immediacy, along with how much of the technology is already available, that inspired the world of the story. I want readers to believe that it could be their world.
In fantasy fiction or a deep-space sci-fi story, the reader is already prepared to believe that extraordinary things are possible in the world described. Whether it be magic, or warp-speed travel, they don’t want a long, detailed description of how these things came about. However, in alternate-now fiction, the transition from today’s reality to the fictional world needs to be plausible and relatable, otherwise readers can be jarred out of the story worrying about the technical details.
I designed and wrote software for many years, and thorough design was always imperative to a deliverable product. Just starting to write code without any idea on how the whole system was going to fit together, usually led to dead-ends, logic holes, delays and bugs.
What’s that got to do with fiction? To me, writing a book is a very similar mental process to writing a software system. Just writing words with no design of the story, leads to dead-ends, logical holes, wasted time and swearing. I spend a long time in the ‘design’ of the book – the plot, timelines and the characters before the first word is written.
In Proximity, a lot of the design time was spent on the world building, its rules, technology, and peoples’ behaviours and beliefs. As with software, you have to test the design by challenging it with questions. Why does it work that way? Is it realistic that the technology evolved that way? Why doesn’t X happen, etc.
Having a technical mind certainly helps think through the technical possibilities, and my years of software experience highlights the likely flaws and issues. The shortcuts that are taken, missed deadlines, and the key fact that developers can’t design and code for every eventuality. I wanted this realism to come out in the story and technology in Proximity.
Why am I worried? Unintended consequences.
When an IT system is used in a way that it wasn’t designed for, then it causes problems. So much of the technology that is designed and built for convenience is also suitable for control. We all carry phones for ease of communication – not for being tracked. Constant surveillance of everyone could reduce crime, but it invades you privacy. It’s the will of the person running the technology, not the inventors and designers, who ultimately define whether it is used for good or bad. For convenience or control.
Consistency and credibility of the world were essential design aims in Proximity, and the hours and hours of world building tested and shaped it. I don’t want an unintended consequence of Proximity to be the speeding up of the arrival of the world it describes. It is fiction and I hope it stays there.
https://scifibulletin.com/books/science-fiction/feature-its-like-now-only-different/