I wrote this book, '2030,' and I was careful in the book not to overdo the future because I don't think it comes that fast.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
So, I guess the answer to your question is very few people can bring off a novel of the future because it's just so damn hard to make it look like the future.
You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.
I've always liked to think ahead. Not stupid-far ahead. A hundred years doesn't interest me. But 20 years interests me, and more for what happens to humans as opposed to things.
What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.
The future is much like the present, only longer.
You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.
Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.
Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.
If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that's becoming quite a big job.
I can't even say I've begun yet, but I'm trying on the idea that there is a book in my future.