Interview: Max Gladstone on the Future
The Hugo and Nebula award-winning Science Fiction author looks ahead.
Welcome to Three Quora Questions, our series of interviews in which a guest expert joins me to field strange and interesting questions posed on Quora.com (the internet’s oddest knowledge repository).
Max Gladstone is one of contemporary sci-fi’s most decorated authors. He’s best known for his Craft Sequence and Craft Wars series, collaborating with George R. R. Martin on Wild Cards, and co-writing the boundary-breaking novella This How You Lose the Time War—which was recently named one of Esquire Magazine’s top 75 science fiction novels ever.
Given his choice of career path, I imagine that Max thinks about the future more frequently than you or I do—and he definitely considers it with greater insight than the good people of the Quora forums. So consider the answers below a public service.
Would you like to visit the past or the future?
MAX: Much as I'd love to go back and figure out what garum tastes like, have the first pizza, experience pre-Colombian Thai food, and thank the inventor of the latte (maybe I should have eaten more for lunch), I have to say: the future.
If what you see is fixed and you can't change it: well, at least you can focus on enjoying what comes. And if not: well, why not nudge things for the better? Particularly if you can go *back* to the future and see how it works out. Plus, I imagine they have cool food in the future. I wonder how those wobbly cockroach bars from Snowpiercer taste....
What will people find most revolting about our society in 100 years’ time?
MAX: If we're talking American domestic conditions that are often taken for granted but would stagger a future tourist, I'd bet it would be the prison system—the United States has 5% of the world's people but 20% of its prisoners, many held in inhuman and overcrowded conditions, and the existence prison's just... taken for granted in the American sense of how society fits together. Prisons and jails don't tend to come off well in the light of history.
Beyond a hundred years, who knows. I imagine the uplifted sentient cows of the year 2400 won't be wild about my ten-year-old leather jacket.
How do you kill a person who can see infinitely into the future?
MAX: This one really depends on how the future vision works. It got my brain overheated trying to game out alternatives.
If this person sees infinitely into *the* future, as in, there's only one future, it's fixed, and nothing can change it, then whatever I try will either work or not, no matter what they know, in an Appointment in Samara kind of way. Does that make it harder or easier? I'm not sure!
We have a good angle of attack, though, with the phrase "see infinitely"—which implies (1) the target's seeing the future as if they're watching it happen, they don't KNOW the future as if they're reading a list of facts about it; and (2) they're not seeing what they will subjectively experience in the future, but instead seeing everything from a third person POV like a surveillance camera, since they will die someday and their eyes will decay. This means for them to be able to see infinitely into the future, their POV can't depend on their physical eyes, so your real goal is to confuse their vision, like a sleight-of-hand magic trick.
If you arrange for a convincing body double to (appear to be) exploded in a car bomb, then this person will be focused more on avoiding car bombs and less on avoiding poison, or even a knife in the back on the way to the car. Mist and utter darkness would also be useful since they'd confound *sight*. Say our target's going to be in an underground parking garage. You cut the lights for a brief period, and while they're out, you snatch the target and replace them with a double, who goes on to impersonate the target for a critical few hours before being "killed" in an accident. If you find a convincing enough double, the target will be so focused on avoiding the accident that they'll miss the lights-out moment in the garage.
Clever targets will be alert to body doubles and sudden blackouts, of course—but the triple- or quadruple-feint, where an *obvious* assassination attempt covers over a subtle, less visual one, should do the trick. And if nothing else, you just make the person so paranoid that they lock themselves in a hotel room with a few gallons of mint chip ice cream and eventually die of a heart attack.
WOULD YOU RATHER?
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///If you arrange for a convincing body double to (appear to be) exploded in a car bomb, then this person will be focused more on avoiding car bombs and less on avoiding poison, or even a knife in the back on the way to the car.///
Man -- humor AND DIY hitman advice. This blog has EVERYTHING!