May 20, 2016

One thing that’s always bugged me about science fiction is the Christian calendar. Sticking with it has made many things either laughably too soon or absurdly too far away. 

Hoverboards and flying cars in Back to the Future’s 2015. We’re past that moment, and we have neither (at least, not available to the mass market).

Blade Runner is three years away ... Roy Batty is not being made anytime soon.

Anything set in the 3000s seems too far afield of now to even speculate about. In fact, putting a fixed date relative to the present is the one of the biggest disservices a sci-fi author can do to their story. The one case where fixed dates don’t rankle me is in stories that extrapolate contemporary culture to a reasonable degree, set in the near future.

My way around this fixed-date problem was to abolish the Christian calendar. I took particular delight in this; I think the moment humanity abandons organized religion (not spirituality, just dogmatic faith) will be a watershed event that heralds unprecedented personal growth and special (as in species) progress. I am not personally an atheist, but I am a big fan of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and I would prefer that all of the evangelical hucksters of the world would simply wink out of existence and stop grifting their flocks.

The events of Disintegration take place 183 years Post Blight (check out my draft idea, The Blight, by the way). When was The Blight? Sometime in the future of a mirror Earth whose present is very much like ours, but I never picked a specific date.

In the story Integration, which takes place before The Blight, the Christian calendar has already been abolished. The Earth I write about is mostly free from the handicaps of dogma, puritanism and shame-culture. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all become cults on the fringes of society, practiced by a dwindling core of zealots, marginalized by a majority comprising pantheist, agnostic and atheists. The less overtly destructive faiths are also still practiced, but their followings are also small and, since their practitioners are inclined to neither violence nor proselytizing, they have no pejorative impact upon mainstream society. Such faiths are actually coexist quite harmoniously with the irreligious society because a mutual respect exists wherein neither side is attempting to sway the other. In this era, humanity adopted a new calendar commemorating the moment where a minimum standard of living was provided to every human being on the planet.

Of course, there needs to be a date where the Christian calendar ends and the Global Socialist calendar begins, but I’m not going to ascribe a specific moment in time to that transition. I’ve always been a bigger fan of "sometime in the future" or "a long time ago" than 2001. Arthur C. Clarke is one of my heroes and, as I mentioned in my video, I can only aspire to his prescience, but he (and others) taught me a valuable lesson about speculating: don’t be specific about the when.

Today is the last day to pre-order Disintegration. If you’ve been waiting for that last-ditch moment, it’s arrived. Maximal tension achieved. Please stop biting your nails and, instead, twiddle your fingers over your mouse and keyboard, or your handheld computing portal to the virtual world, and -- at least -- get me to (giddy up) 409. ;)