Besides, at least half of my published or produced work has been sci-fi, which means that whether I like it or not, I wear the sci-fi writer keychain ... so I am required, now and then, to look ahead, to extrapolate or speculate about the future.Last December I wrote of one possible future form of entertainment--see "Portrait of the Artist as Content Provider." But that was fiction ... a nightmare or a fantasy, depending on your point of view. It was playing the sci-fi writer's game "what if?"
What if I had to extrapolate--be a trend-spotter--to use the other classic sci-fi writer's gambit, "if this goes on?" What will I be watching in the year 2020? What am I watching it on?
I won't inflict my vision of the world on you--if I had any idea what energy source would be most in demand, I'd be on the phone to my broker. I can't predict the chances of a Near Earth Object smacking into the Pacific. I have no helpful perspective on the possible rise of sea levels or the new advance of certain glaciers.
I will limit myself to sci-fi on the screen.
Seer of seers
Since we will all be reading more of our fiction on Kindles and other devices, by 2020 it will be clear that novels need not be confined to a portable pile of paper. A series like George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire could live just as happily--if not more happily--online, where its length could be infinite, where sidestream chapters and character profiles and art and dramatized pieces could enhance the experience.
Movie theaters--dream palaces--will be dying if not dead. As with live theaters, you'll be able to find a few in any major city, but the day of the Cineplex will be over. Blockbusters on the scale of Transformers XII and Batman: The Dark Knight Goes Upstairs will be piped directly to your home computer/TV for a fee on the day of release.(By the way, what I see isn't necessarily what I want to see. Some movies are clearly events that are meant to be experienced as part of an audience.)
Your television screen will be bigger than you are. You laugh--so what? But that has been one of the defining differences between film and television and is a major factor in the impact a story has on you. A piece of entertainment that looms over you in the dark, that forces you to keep your mouth shut and cell phone off, affects you differently from a piece you watch in your living room or den--stopping and re-starting with your DVR--while the cat slices at that corner of the chair or your child talks about her math homework.
You will be able to order up any episode of every TV series ever made. You might remember that viewers used to pay attention to things called "networks" or channels.
Feature film and television actors may be working less. I'm not suggesting that we still won't be happy to watch a Brad Pitt or Kate Beckinsale on the screen. I just believe that the continuing improvements in processing speeds will, by 2020, allow a writer/director/content provider to license some sort of reference file--an actor's face, voice, figure, movements--and simply plug that into a CGI-based sequence or setting.
As it is, pre-production and post-production are almost entirely digital processes. Few people enjoy standing around frozen landscapes at 5 in the morning waiting for the right light to begin with. Studios won't mind not paying to support a crew of 50 in Thailand or the Antarctic. No, it's just a matter of years before "principal photography" (that quaint term) becomes another digital domain.
(What this technology will really enable is a vast army of intellectual property lawyers, agents and managers.)
These are fairly tame guesses about technology. What about the content of sci-fi circa 2020?
Future retro remakes of the now
While the explosion of sci-fi movies that began in the late 1970s was driven by technology--that is, it was now possible to film sci-fi space battles and encounters with aliens that weren't laughable--it was also a demographic phenomenon: Boomer Babies like Lucas and Spielberg had reached an age where they could revisit concepts and images from their impressionable years.
In my experience, writers, directors, producers and studio heads are all more comfortable with the material they grew up on.
Which suggests that an entertainment exec who is 35 in the year 2020--who was 13 in 1998--sees Lois McMaster Bujold, Robert Sawyer and Connie Willis as her favorite novelists. All of these authors await high-end, big-screen adaptation. (Why no one has turned Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories into a film or TV series is baffling.)
That exec might see 2020 as the perfect time for a remake of The X-Files as a television series. Or Buffy. Or Babylon 5. There might be a feature film version of Xena.Or, perhaps, a return to the worlds that tweens of the mid-1990s inhabited more frequently ... those of Starcraft, Half-Life, Myst. To Image and Dark Horse Comics heroes, not Marvel and D.C.
Of course, the newest thing in entertainment over the past decade is online roleplaying, worlds like Second Life.
The idea that you, the reader, could don a suit or helmet and go playing in a virtual reality world is old hat speculation: It's here now.
But by 2020 there should be a totally immersive sci-fi experience that combines storytelling with game and role-playing, that incorporates Smell-A-Vision and Sensurround and a ride at Six Flags.
Sci-fi 2020 should go beyond virtual ... not only could you become a character on a world like Herbert's Arrakis or McCaffrey's Pern ... you should actually be able to feel the hot wind on your face or barely controlled terror of riding a dragon through the skies.
It all feels a little Matrix-like ... except to be truly engaging and new, the user should face real danger. Real pain.
Would I subscribe to this? I'm not sure. I like to think about the future. I'm not sure how happy I'll be living in it.
All I know for certain about entertainment 2020 is that Law & Order will be producing new episodes.
Michael Cassutt has written novels, short stories, non-fiction and scripts for series such as Max Headroom, The Twilight Zone and The Dead Zone. He also teaches at the University of Southern California.
