When The Boy Who Fell from the Sky was published on September 22, 2015, the world was quite different.
There was widespread optimism about the future. Climate change was talked about mainly in scientific journals and was not dominating the front pages of newspapers as it is now. To me, at least, back then, whilst I was very worried about climate change, technology seemed to offer magic and hope.
In building a world for my fiction, I tried to imagine life in London in 2055 – a combination of technological advance that, for the middle classes, at least, would offer an evolution of technologies we have today, against the backdrop of the environmental and political impact of climate change. My information came from popular science magazines and books.
Eight years on, it feels like a good moment to reflect on the predictions about everyday technology that I used back then. These included: self driving cars, holographic VR, smart vision technology, smart medicine with robot doctors swimming in our blood and bio weapons, domestic robots, smart materials like paper, contact lenses, self healing membranes, materials that minmic human skin, and, of course, artificial intelligence.
In a series of blog posts, I will explore some of the ideas that appears in my two series of novels and check in on speed of progress in research and application. Some of these technologies have advanced faster than I imagined, as has climate change.