iPhones on Arrakis
Still Scrolling in the Year 10,191
Fantasy is metastasizing and choking out hard SF in their hybrid genre. I’ve written about this before. One reason is that young men don’t read, while young women do. This gives publishers an economic incentive to reshape every genre into romance or erotica. Goodbye space armadas. Hello dragons, vampires, and supernatural love triangles.
Another reason is the breakneck pace of technological change—especially in artificial intelligence. As
has pointed out, even contemporary literary fiction can feel like a period piece by the time it makes it through the glacial pipeline of editing, production, marketing, and distribution. Authors of nonfiction books about AI face the same problem. Their work is already outdated by the time it reaches readers. The same holds true for writers of near-future science fiction. You need to offer the reader more than just a plausible forecast, because real-world events will overtake and humiliate your speculation in short order.Chiang’s Law states that science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people. Projecting yourself into the role of a special person is easy and gratifying. Projecting yourself into an environment governed by unfamiliar rules—and then maintaining continuous awareness of those rules and their counterintuitive effects—is strenuous and thankless work.
This tension between strange rules and easy gratification isn’t just theoretical for me. I created the seed characters for Fear and Loathing in the Kuiper Belt while playing a TTRPG online with old college friends a few years ago. The game was Mothership, a science fiction/horror survival RPG inspired by Alien and Event Horizon. The pre-release ruleset was still under development at the time, and both the mechanics and the setting were undercooked and sketchy.
The game had a retro-futuristic technological vibe: boxy CRT monitors, toggle switches, and dark industrial corridors. Some people described it as cassette deck futurism. Character creation involved spending points to determine your starting bankroll and then buying equipment. A smartphone wasn’t on the gear list, and it would have cost a lot of money—and taken up an absurd amount of personal space—to carry all the separate devices that a smartphone bundles together: communications gear, camera, flashlight, computer, and so on.
Our GM’s initial conceit was to stick to a hard SF setting. That meant no FTL, no replicators or transporters, and no techno-magical Star Trek gravity plating. That was the idea, but as a group we had trouble keeping microgravity physics in mind. We kept slipping back into people falling down when injured or dropped items falling to the deck. We also struggled to remember that our characters didn’t have the casual superpowers conferred by a world of ubiquitous smartphones.
Looking back, that part strikes me as especially funny, because everyone in the group had played Dungeons & Dragons, a game that’s supposed to take place in a low-tech setting. You might think that operating within those limitations would come naturally to fantasy gamers, but in the interest of fun, players usually ignore the mundane concerns that would dominate the attention of people living in a genuinely low-tech world.
Imagine putting on platemail armor and exploring a cave system. You plan to be there a while, so you're not just wearing armor—you’re also carrying everything you’ll need to survive. That includes food and water, which the game typically condenses into a single number on your character sheet labeled rations.
Now think about how big and heavy a plastic gallon jug of water is—the kind you can buy at Walmart. Picture yourself hauling three of those, plus a golf bag full of weapons, while tromping through underground tunnels all day—and then getting into a fight with a roving band of hobgoblins. Now factor in that plastic doesn’t exist in your fantasy setting.
How much water would you need to survive in a subterranean environment for days? How much does that water weigh? How would you carry it? These are not fun questions. They’re tedious. In my experience, it’s a rare dungeon master who’s a stickler for issues of encumbrance. Most players just treat all that logistical stuff like a life bar in a video game and get on with the hacking and slashing.
And then there’s loot. You’ve assembled your party of fighters, clerics, magic users, and thieves and ventured into the underworld in search of riches. Or maybe your mission is to rescue the princess—but somehow, all the monsters you kill along the way seem to be en route to a high-stakes poker game. They’re carrying serious amounts of hard currency. What are you going to do—not loot the corpses of the monsters you slay on your noble quest?
What happens after you kill the dragon in its underground lair? How are you supposed to haul that entire mound of gold coins back to civilization so you can spend it? Easy. Just write the number of gold pieces from the dragon’s hoard on your character sheet and treat it like so much Bitcoin: massless, fungible, and effortlessly portable.
What—you didn’t know that Satoshi Nakamoto was a dragon?
As I remember it, in our attempt to collectively imagine a hard SF setting for our Mothership campaign, I was usually the one saying, “He fell to the floor? Really? In a base built into an asteroid?” Or, “How are you relaying that information? Did you purchase comm gear?”
After a few such conceptual resets that harshed our collective suspension of disbelief, we all agreed: artificial gravity was a thing, and everybody gets a smartphone. We didn’t bother with the tedious detail that smartphones are just the end nodes of a sprawling communications network—one that, in our world, depends on a global forest of cell towers, base station controllers, mobile switching centers, home and visitor location registers, gateway switching centers, and so on. We had them, and they worked, because trying to imagine getting by in that setting without them was tedious.
Corporate headquarters hasn’t heard from this remote outpost in weeks. You’re sent to investigate. When you get there, you find everyone dead. Maybe the lights are off—but of course the artificial gravity and Wi-Fi still work.
So what?
Games are supposed to be fun. Killing monsters is fun. Parlaying with bandit chiefs or bargaining with demon princes is fun. Accounting for the weight and volume of potable water—or detailing exactly how you determined that the dragon’s hoard contains exactly 19,614 gold coins, 23 rubies, 216 pieces of silver, and a fireball-shooting wand with 7 charges remaining—is fun for only a very small subset of gamers.
What, did you all sit there for a week—bleeding and half-cooked—counting the stuff?
I’m not saying anyone should bother with that sort of thing. Not when you’re just trying to have fun with friends. But still…
Holding strange rules in mind and applying them consistently to your campaign—or your novel’s setting—is work. Imagining ourselves as special people in superficially exotic worlds that still work the way we expect them to is fun and easy. Even in a hard SF setting, most of us would rather focus on being special people than expend the mental energy needed to keep strange rules in effect.
If you read this Substack regularly, you may recall me mentioning something about the rapidly increasing capabilities of artificial intelligence, of which large language models are just the most visible incarnation. Flooding the environment with intelligence—even if it’s not quite the same as our evolved biological kind—is already changing the rules that shape our lived experience. In other words, strange rules are the new norm. And here we are—my Gen X college friends and I, who didn’t grow up with mobile phones or the internet—struggling to imagine operating in a world without smartphones.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge is a 2006 novel set in San Diego in the year 2025. Robert, the POV character, wakes up to an unfamiliar world after advanced medical technology cures the late-stage Alzheimer’s that had robbed him of his cognitive abilities and conscious continuity. Not only is his mind restored, but so are most of the effects of aging. He’s in his seventies but looks like a teenager. That’s how far medical science has progressed by 2025.
The people around him still move through the physical world, but they’re continuously immersed in augmented reality via wearable computing tech. They’re so deeply embedded in these simulated layers that a malicious hacker can effectively control their actions by hijacking their feeds and altering their perception of reality.
Robert doesn’t know how to use this kind of wearable tech, so he accesses the virtual world through an interface skinned to look like the Windows XP UI. And nobody in this version of 2025 carries a smartphone. Why? Because the novel was published in the same year Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. That means Vinge wrote it at least a year or two before the iPhone existed. So, naturally, his vision of 2025 doesn’t include them.
I’m currently writing a prequel to Fear and Loathing in the Kuiper Belt called Liber Novus. It’s set on an O’Neill cylinder—or rather, a pair of counter-rotating cylinders—30.5 AU from Sol, beyond the Dyson Swarm that separates the inner system realm of the Powers from the trans-Neptunian human civilization. The spin habitat, Galtz—formerly Galt’s Gulch—is the capital of the Pax Columbia. The Pax not only operates at a much lower tech level than the inner system ASI, it also suffered a cataclysmic upheaval a couple of generations ago that resulted in war and significant technological regression. They can still build ring habitats like the Stanford torus, but they can’t build new O’Neill cylinders1.
Circumstances force Paul—a nihilistic, alcoholic pseudo-intellectual—into service as a detective. Yes, it’s a noir detective story set on a spin habitat in the 28th century. Much of the world-building is designed to keep the setting comprehensible to contemporary readers. For example, iPhones exist in Liber Novus. The characters call them slates and think very little of them, aside from the fact that people who don’t carry them probably have neural implants. Implants are low-status. Truly high-status individuals neither carry slates nor have implants. Underlings tell them what they need to know.
Dune is set more than ten thousand years in the future, but it unfolds in a technologically and culturally stagnant setting without ubiquitous AI. Frank Herbert didn’t want to tell a story about a galaxy-spanning empire of post-human machines, so he built his fictional universe around a defining event: the Butlerian Jihad, a successful uprising against AI-enabled totalitarianism. There’s no AI in Dune because Herbert was interested in exploring humanity in the far future. There are no iPhones in Dune because it was published in 1965.
The iPhone displaced popular phone designs that resembled the flip-to-talk communicators from Star Trek: The Original Series. Futurists and science fiction writers had imagined iPhone-like devices before 2007, but the idea never permeated the popular imagination the way the “Beam me up, Scotty” communicator had.
Before 2007, if you wanted an iPhone in your SF story, you had to explain what it was and what it did. After 2007, if your setting didn’t feature iPhones—or something recognizably similar—you had to explain their absence.
I’m currently listening to Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by
. As far as I remember, the author doesn’t give an exact year for the setting, but it seems to be set somewhere in the mid-22nd century. A high sea wall protects Manhattan from being submerged. The main character, Lydia, works as a translator for an alien ambassador. Translating for the aliens takes a cumulative toll on the human brain—something very much like alcohol intoxication. The longer you talk to them, the drunker you get. Early in the book, Lydia is attending a play and translating it in real time for her alien boss. She gets so drunk in the process that she falls over a balcony railing.It’s not a first contact story. The aliens have been on Earth for a long time. Some people hate them and weave baroque conspiracy theories around their presence, but they’re no longer a novelty. The world of the novel is one of economic stagnation and mass unemployment, where most people never travel far from their place of birth and most experience is mediated by VR technology. It isn’t our world—but it’s recognizable as one ours could plausibly become.
Lydia, the protagonist, is a social outlier because she suffers from a medical condition that limits her ability to use the immersive VR interfaces common to the setting. Instead, she uses something closer to smart glasses. But she also has an iPhone. Everyone does, though in this world they’re called scrolls—a pun that evokes both rolled parchment documents and the upward thumb gesture used to pull novel new content into view on your handheld screen. The author doesn’t have to explain what a scroll is, why even poor people carry one, or what role it plays in society. They’re iPhones.
In Robert Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice, the main character finds himself switching between alternate universes. His home universe is one without television. In an aside to the reader, he says something like2:
“If you live in a world with television, then you know what I’m talking about. If you live in a world without television, I couldn’t begin to make you understand how simultaneously bizarre and trivial it is.”
We’re so accustomed to a world of television, social media, and smartphones that it’s difficult—even for people who’ve appointed themselves the task—to imagine a world that operates by strange rules. But the rules are changing, like ground shifting beneath our feet. And to the extent that our calm complacency is useful to the high-agency entities who shape the world, they’ll insulate us in simulated bubbles where everything still feels familiar.
When it becomes useful to freak us out, they’ll drop the veil—and watch us gape and flounder in uncomprehending panic.
This line of thought continues in the most recent post to the Immutable Mobiles Substack blog.
The primary difference between a Stanford torus and an O'Neill cylinder is one of scale. The Stanford torus, a design concept from a 1975 NASA study, is a toroidal (donut-shaped) ring with a major diameter of approximately 1.1 miles (∼1.8 km), with the habitable tube itself being about 430 feet (∼130 m) in diameter. It was envisioned to house a population of about 10,000 people.
In contrast, the O'Neill cylinder, specifically the "Island Three" model proposed by Gerard K. O'Neill, represents a far more massive structure. It consists of a pair of counter-rotating cylinders, each typically designed to be 4 to 5 miles (∼6.4 to 8 km) in diameter and up to 20 miles (∼32 km) long. The combined habitable land area within a pair of these cylinders would be around 500 square miles (∼1,300 km2), capable of supporting a population of several million. Therefore, while both are concepts for permanent space settlements, the O'Neill cylinder is orders of magnitude larger in every dimension and intended for a significantly larger population.
Pulled from my decades-old memories of the book. I don’t have the text ready to hand. If anyone can supply the exact quote, I’d be much obliged.
I disagree only in that I adore holding strange rules in my mind and picking them apart. It's fundamental to why I enjoy science fiction. Simultaneously, I very much feel the problem that by the time an author finishes an idea in writing, it's often become visibly dated in text. It's frustrating to try and produce material fast enough that it still seems 'current' when eventually published.
As I said in the podcast I recently did with the Brothers Krynn, I expect some sort of a science-epic to emerge as a counter to the classical epics of the past and in partnership with some type of technological restabilization over the next hundred years. Unless a restabilization never occurs, if that's the case, I have no idea what the future will look like.