Whenever someone sends me something with that title it always accompanies some article about the first bionic eyes hooked into the brain of a blind woman or some thing about getting closer to cold fusion.  Things that we aren’t going to see in common use for the time being, if ever.  Meanwhile the amount of technology that is coming into our lives is increasing.  When you think about it, we are the science fiction stories.

Years and years ago, in that preteen age I read a story about a young woman obsessed with a rock singer.  I don’t remember the name of the story or the author, but it was one of the rare realistic things I read.  The girl and her friend sneak into the hotel and meet the rock star who turns out to be an utter dipwad, thereby crushing the girl’s vision of him.  Now you don’t need to go to the trouble of sneaking into a hotel room.  Now you can just read their blog.

I’m thinking of this because there are a lot of sf authors who blog.  (It makes sense that sf authors would embrace new technology, doesn’t it?)  And it isn’t unheard of for fans to backlash against an author.  There was the Anne Rice incident and if I remember right, Poppy Z. Brite also had thing with her fans a few years back, though I don’t remember what and I can’t seem to find anything on it now.  But even if we’re not talking about big fireworks, there is still a level of personal interaction and knowledge of the authors we love.

Which brings me to technology.  Years ago if you loved Heinlein or Asimov or not even that far back, if you adored William Gibson in the 80s, you found every book and story by that author and you read it.  You’d hunt up interviews if you could get them.  And that was about it.  You could read the author bios at the back of the book and see the picture if they had one.  The rest was up to you.  Writers were wizards who conjured up worlds and there was no humanizing aspect to change that perception.  Just their stories, polished, perfected, bound and sold for $4.95 in paperback.

Now there are blogs.  (Yes, I’m writing one.)  It’s not quite like meeting the author in person, but you do get a sense of the person behind the words.  The magic is gone, the wizard comes out from behind the curtain, and you learn that he or she also is on a diet, hates to exercise, is nervous about a new novel sent out, angry at politicians, got caught in traffic, had a flight canceled.  Do we really want to know?

Mind you, I read a lot of blogs, and I clearly write one, so I’m not arguing for or against blogging, I’m simply wondering at the implications of it.  Are losing something by this practice?  Will today’s fourteen year-olds ever feel the awe towards writers that I felt at that age?  Or will they feel it more because of the on-line personal connection?  In blogging, do authors give away too much, taking off the wizards cap and showing the human behind the magic?  Do we need to look up to writers at all?  Maybe thinking of them as wizards in the first place is unhealthy.  Maybe knowing the daily life of favorite authors will inspire others to write. 

For better or worse, the technology is here and we will use it.  The results and implications will work themselves out.  But I find it interesting, we could now tell that story about the girl and the rock star using technology instead of a hotel room.  The girl would never need to meet her object of affection face to face.  A science fiction story set in the current time.  The future is now.