Spies among us

Rick's Monday post was sobering. Not only because of the many ways we can be monitored and tracked and spied on, but also because this technology changes and evolves all the time. So even if we writers do include the most up-to-date gadgetry in our latest opus, by the time it has wended its way through the glacial publishing process and arrived on bookstore shelves, the technology will be out of date. And some astute reader will call us out.

But we can but try. Technology has facilitated the job for our characters in many ways. How many times has one of our characters looked up needed information in the middle of a case, or Googled someone to find out background? How many times have they used alerts, GPS, and whatnot to guide them through their day. But technology has also made plot twists more challenging. We can no longer make our characters lost in the wilderness (either urban or rural), when a reader would just say, Turn on your map app, idiot! We can no longer place our characters in peril without a reader yelling Why don't you call 911? Or your mother? We writers have to go to great lengths to get around this instant world-at-our-fingertips. Batteries have to die or the phone has to be dropped in water, both of which make the character look inept, or the character has to be in a dead zone, of which there fewer and fewer. At least in Canada in the dead of winter, batteries seem to have a life of about five minutes, so it's still possible for a character to be caught out unexpectedly.

Back in the mists of time, when my eldest was a newborn and neither cellphones nor personal computers were around, we bought a marvellous new-fangled gadget called a baby monitor. (Aside: look this up on Google and you'll find the first baby monitors were developed in 1937 in response to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping). We placed the recorder by the crib and took the receiver downstairs with us. It had two channels, A and B. We selected one at random and were delighted to be able to monitor our daughter's every breath. One day, being daring, I switched to the other channel, and suddenly, out of the blue, we were listening to a ferocious argument of our neighbours down the street! Ummm, talk about too much information. As a crime writer, however, I immediately saw the potential of this device for a crime story.

Since then, technology has intruded further and further into our lives, with some of us preferring to hide under our bed to stay out of the digital spotlight, and others embracing each new invasion. Today, that same daughter lives in a "smart home" where everything is wirelessly connected. She can sit in Ottawa and watch the Uber Eats driver delivering her family's food to their house in Toronto. She can play with the temperature in their house and add items to their grocery list. Clearly, most of us don't mind being ruled by that little round gadget on the counter that seems to know every aspect of our lives. No chance for sneaking around behind your spouse's or parents' backs with this home!

This summer we were up at my cottage, where life is still pretty simple. We bring our smart phones and laptops with us to stay connected on the mobile network, but there is no wifi and we waste very little time online. One day we were all sitting in the living room, glumly watching the rain pour down the window panes, and I wistfully remarked, "What's the weather going to be tomorrow, does anyone know?" And my two year-old granddaughter, sitting on the sofa beside me, pipes up "Why don't you ask Google?"

In a flash I remembered that baby monitor that watched over her mother all those years ago, and I thought, what a change in one generation. Could anyone have imagined it? And can we imagine what the next generation will bring?

That, of course, is the landscape of science fiction writers, not crime. 

Using Technology in Fiction

Rick’s post yesterday about his background in music got me thinking about my own background, i.e. what I did before I started writing. I was a Computer Science major in college, earning both of my degrees during the 1980s. When I started studying computers,

Xerox 8010 time share systems were on their way in and punch cards were on their way out. The Apple II and TRS-80 came out the year I started my undergraduate degree. By the time I received my B.S. four years later, the IBM PC was on the way to store shelves, helping to bring personal computing to the masses.

My first programming assignment was writing software for the Xerox Star 8010 http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/xerox-8010/. (I started working at Xerox right before the first release came out in 1981.) For many years, I worked on it and the systems that followed. It was a great time to be programming. Icon based systems were new and you felt like you were on the cutting edge. I have many fond memories of my time there. By the time I stopped programming twenty years or so later, the computer world had drastically changed.

Technology can be a lot of fun to include in a story, particularly in a mystery. You’ve heard pacemakers can be hacked, right? That’s an interesting method of murder to use in a story. But, technology changes at light speed. Apparently, now traces are left behind when someone hacks a pacemaker. https://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/hacking-pacemakers-for-murder-no-longer-the-perfect-crime/

So, when you’re writing a crime story you have to decide how much technology to put in and be aware that what you use in a story may not work the same even a year later. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put it in. You just have to be aware that an intricate plot device you set up today may not make sense to someone who reads the book years later.

Then there’s the ubiquitousness of cell phones in every day life today. Plots set in modern times have to take into account that calls can be made from pretty much anywhere so if you want a character to be out of reach you either have to put him in a dead zone, have him forget to charge his/her phone, have him/her lose the phone or have it no longer functioning for some reason. Then there’s the use of phones by people of different ages. Someone in their 70s probably uses a phone differently than someone in their 20s. Sometimes, I think Sue Grafton has the right idea by setting her Kinsey Millhone mysteries in the 1980s before cell phones, the internet, Facebook, twitter and wi-fi existed or were common.

My protagonist in Fatal Brushstroke is a freelance programmer. I don’t dwell on what she does because, well, programming can be quite boring to read about. But she is of an analytical bent, as many programmers are, and she does use the internet to do research. (And the fact she works freelance means she makes her own schedule and can do her sleuthing any time of the day or night.)

Keeping up with all the technology changes can be quite daunting. I’m not sure it’s even possible. But I still intend to put bits and pieces of technology in my stories. But when I need a break, I think I’ll write that historical I’ve been thinking about. Of course, that brings up a whole other set of problems...