Back to technovela : What We Reading This Summer

Fiction is full of predictions. Figuring out the future may not be the sole occupation of novelists, but it's a side job for many. While data scientists, tech entrepreneurs, and the CIA are scrambling to predict ways the world will change based on past events and algorithms, the imaginings of novelists sometimes prove more prescient.

1. Microserfs

In the 90s Microsoft was Apple and Bill Gates was Steve Jobs. Douglas Coupland documented these seminal Internet boom days in his novel Microserfs, and described Gates thusly: "Bill is a moral force, a spectral force, a force that shapes, a force that molds. A force with thick, thick glasses." Microserfs follows a group of coders as they drift from the safe environs of Redmond to the more unsure shores of startup life in Silicon Valley. There are bits about Apple in Microserfs that give a glimpse at history (and maybe the future) as employees flee the company amid rumors of a Samsung buyout.

2. The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest

Venture capital flowed more freely in the 1990s than it does now. Po Bronson captures the absurdity of those days in The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest. It's filled with the frantic attempts of a programmer to take on the song-and-dance role of a startup entrepreneur. In a bit of "everything old is new again," the programmer's networked PC in need of funding is essentially a Chromebook—before Google even existed.

3. The Minority Report

Philip K. Dick's short story The Minority Report has big ideas, including a majority report which predicts crime by analyzing the thoughts of "precogs," or mutants with predictive ability. Political scientists use similar systems such as Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's Policon, a computer model that predicts events and behaviors based on questions asked across a panel of experts.

4. Neuromancer

The "consensual hallucination" that is cyberspace was first envisioned by William Gibson in his 1984 book Neuromancer. While most of us now live in the collective dream/nightmare that is the Internet, Gibson also imagined computers inhabited by saved consciousness—something Ray Kurzweil is working toward at Google. And speaking of Google, we might all soon see (or see out of) the cybernetic eyes in Neuromancer with the Google Glass contact lenses under development.

5. Super Sad True Love Story

Gary Shteyngart is a Glass Explorer and also the spiritual forefather of Google Glass. In Super Sad True Love Story the characters wear apparats, pendants that serve as communicators, guides, and ranking systems. One thing in the novel yet to happen is the unloved NYC borough of Staten Island attaining the hipster cred of Brooklyn, though that may be on the way.