If you set a science fiction story in the far future (or another planet, or somewhere else a long way from here and now), it's comparatively easier than when you set it on Earth just a couple of years hence. You don't really need to include anything that's so obviously evolved out of how we live today.
But if your tale is set in our world just a few years away ('five minutes in the future' is the term for it), you need to perform the nimble trick of making things futuristic enough but identifiable enough so you can understand the ideas, technologies, practices or customs of today they've grown out of.
One of the biggest challenges any writer dealing in sci-fi faces is the mobile phone. In any number of horror or thriller movies where someone's in desperate need of help, the obstacle they inevitably face in an age where we all carry a window to the world in our pocket is having no bars. One day in the future when they invent a mobile transmission technology that blankets the Earth effortlessly, it'll render a million 'lost in the woods with an axe-wielding psycho and no phone reception' stories obsolete.
I didn't face that exact problem in Falling because nobody was really cut off from anyone else or nearby help to that extent, being as it's set in the urban area of a major city. But I knew going in that mobile phones would be part of these people's lives no different than they are for ours, so they'd have to feature pretty heavily.
The alternative would be some shoehorned-in passage somewhere about how studies eventually proved mobile phones had actually been unsafe all along with all the ionising radiation they're pouring into our heads, and had fallen out of use. It'd be a cack handed Deus Ex Machina, and as the reader you'd see straight through it, knowing I was just too lazy to put the right amount of effort into getting them right.
It's ultimately up to you whether I did it successfully or not, but I was pretty chuffed with my efforts. I made them part of the landscape of Falling's world by calling them alternatively mobiles or phones as we do now, but also by the unofficial product name they adopt at some time in the future, the CMD, even if you as the reader weren't fully up to speed on the culture and nomenclature. I also made reference to something called an 'array' that was similarly entrenched in a digital society, even if you weren't yet sure what it meant.
Then, somewhere in Book 4, I break off from Vicki answering a call to explain how mobile phones have evolved, what they can do and what the whole world of personal and mobile communications and computing looks like in 2037. I think it does some pretty decent world building, but you be the judge.
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As she sat down at her desk a message reminder trilled loudly from her bag. Her phone must have gone off in the car on the way back, and Vicki furrowed her brow, scolding herself as she fished in her handbag for it. She always had music in the car up too loud and wondered if she unconsciously did so on purpose. Because it usually meant more commitments than she had time for, she hated the sound of her mobile going off – or CMD, as they were commonly called nowadays.
Converged Media Devices swallowed up the fragmented mobile communications, media player and handheld device market throughout the 2020s and finding someone who didn't have one was increasingly rare.
Born in 2001, Vicki didn't get her first mobile until she was nearly 12 – unusual among most kids who had them by eight or nine. Back then mobile phones were pretty rudimentary compared to even a basic model CMD.
Now they'd taken the place of the bulky desk-bound computer tower and laptop, the mobile smartphone, the midsize tablet and everything in between. You could perform all general computing, media consumption and mobile connectivity tasks on it, but that was just the beginning.
Text to speech algorithms could make your whole workflow voice or text based, converting between the two whenever you liked. Search services and heuristics had combined to come as close to human intuition as computer science had ever come, and speaking a query could spark off fact-finding missions by software agents that returned and filtered results from finding a plumber to writing a thesis.
Solar panels powered devices for long enough so you need never connect them to mains. Projector and hologram technology could replicate 3D renderings of scenes or still images captured by more powerful and sensitive cameras than had ever existed in standalone photographic equipment.
Hardware like fingerprint unlock scanners and hyperspectral cameras had morphed into bio-sensitive panels and optic sensors that sampled any number of biological markers, telling you anything from whether your salad was fresh to sequencing a gene to test how you'd likely respond to a drug compound. The same tools had long been applied to digital identity verification, which gave even basic models expansive monetary transaction abilities.
They'd also long since overtaken the capacity of the bulky disk platters of the PC era. Most data was stored in far-flung servers and the very airwaves overhead as magnetic or phonic waves, onboard disk storage virtually phased out.
Processing power inside CMDs was rudimentary, only enough to manage the data of input and display, giving them a far longer charge cycle and overall life than old smartphones had ever boasted, with the actual computation of functions distributed among far flung networks at lightning speed.
But to many people, the most important feature was that the concept of having so many different methods to contact someone like written SMS, old–style email and embedded chat clients had more or less disappeared. You simply 'messaged' someone through a generic gateway and software agents between you and them decided the best way to transmit it depending on what services or applications the recipient was using at that moment.
The same intelligent software agents that conducted searches also screened incoming communications and the unsolicited or unwanted messages that had plagued the online world's early days had become a thing of the past.
As the CMD replaced everything from the computer to the movie player and game console, the combined array rose in prominence – generic, inexpensive combinations of screen and keyboard that became your input and display for work that wasn't feasible on the small screen of a CMD.
Arrays replaced the PC on the desks and living room tables of workplaces and households the world over, cheap accessibility driving them farther than the PC ever reached. In this day and age, there were few places in society you couldn't sit down and plug your CMD into the nearest array to work if you preferred – they were as common as power outlets.
Nobody had been quite sure what to call the early everything-in-your-pocket devices, but an early product name – CMD – had stuck, like people still used the brand name 'Hoover' for any domestic vacuum cleaner.