The Possessor Wars

I've been asked why the technology in the world of the Possessor Wars isn't more advanced. After all, it's set in the 28th Century (700 years from now). The answer is simple: World War III.

World War III was the first interplanetary conflict in human history. It didn't start out that way, but it ended that way. At first, the reasons the war started were shrouded in mystery. Later, they became very well known.

The war started with a limited exchange of nuclear weapons across the globe. Nations around the world quickly tried to get a handle on the situation and stop the nuclear powers from extinguishing all life on the planet. So, fortunately for everyone, the radiation damage was thought of as "limited" because only a few spots on the globe were made uninhabitable.

But of course, that didn't stop the war.

As Jeff mentions in The Boy Who Fell into the Sky, one of the most terrible weapons used in WW III was the nanobomb. The nanobomb is a missile that contains billions of tiny robots called nanobots. Nanobots are microscopic robots that can be as small as one molecule in size.

The nanobots in nanobombs were slightly larger, about the size of an amoeba. Nanobombs don't hit the ground. They explode about 1,000 feet up in the air. This causes the nanobots to rain down on everything and everyone. This is one of the reasons nanobombs are so bad.

If you are lucky enough not to be outside when a nanobomb explodes, you're still in danger. The nanobots the bomb releases will stay in the environment for weeks. They stick to all surfaces. This includes all plants, buildings, streets, animals, and so forth. If you touch just one nanobot of this type, it will begin tearing you apart molecule by molecule. It uses the molecules that it steals from your body to build more nanobots. And guess what they do? Right. They tear molecules from your body and build more copies of themselves.

And the nanobots were programmed to only tear human beings apart-nothing else. In this way, the real culprit behind WW III was able to eliminate half of the human population without causing much damage to the planet.

It was truly monstrous.

After the war was won, civilization more or less collapsed. Most people turned to farming to survive. Many were able to supply themselves with electricity by using the technology that still remained. But with half of all humans gone, civilization couldn't function like it did before. The world fell back to the level of technology that was common in the 1950s. And it stayed that way for centuries.

Technology on Earth was so stagnant that humanity didn't return to space for 200 years. And when they did, it wasn't people from Earth who built the first spaceships.

Before the war, the Japanese established a colony on Mars that was more or less self-sustaining. But when the war came, there was really nothing they could do for the people back on Earth. They were just barely surviving themselves. However, because they had been spared the horrors of the war, they were able to keep advancing in many ways until they were able to return to space.

It really takes a lot of people to build even a simple spaceship. Each Apollo spacecraft (the ones that went to the Moon) required the efforts of almost a million people. These people mined the minerals and metals, crafted them into spaceship parts, and built the ship. Others did the same for the astronauts' spacesuits. So you see, it's not easy to go into space even if you know how. It takes a large population with a lot of technical know-how.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the population was slowly growing and people were once again building a technical civilization.

The upshot of all this is that eventually everything technological advancements started to get moving again. But it took a long time. So in Jeff Bowman's time, the technology really wasn't as advanced as you'd expect.

You also have to remember that Jeff and his friends come from the low end of the arcology. They were poor. In the Boy Who Fell into the Sky, Jose comments that Jeff's datapad was old technology when Jose's grandfather was young. He's right. People in the lower parts of the arcology had very limited access to the technology of their time. Their opportunities in life were also limited as a result. There was not only a wealth gap between the rich and the poor, there was a technology gap as well. Jeff and his friends were living a life that was not all that different (technologically speaking) from what we have today. 

I mean yes, we don't live in big cans that are more than 10 miles high. But many of us are starting to experiment with robots that are not a whole lot dumber than Jeff and his friends were building. And their datapads are just advanced versions of the tablet computers we have today.

So Jeff's world isn't that much different than ours-at least until he leaves the arcology. Then everything starts to change. He's immediately immersed in a level of technology that's much more advanced than what he's been growing up with. It really changes his point of view.

One more question I get asked is, "Did you copy the iPad for Jeff's datapad?"

The answer is no. I started The Boy Who Fell into the Sky in 1999, which was years before there were iPads. I thought it up before Steve Jobs did.

To be fair, Star Trek and other science fiction shows (and other science fiction books) had similar information pads long before I wrote The Boy Who Fell into the Sky. The first mention of it that I've found in all of science fiction was in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The astronauts on the Discovery used news pads were basically the same as iPads. So as far as I know, Mr. Clarke deserves the credit for thinking up the datapad, not me. 

But that's ok. The datapad has appeared in science fiction in one form or another for decades now. And now we have them in real life.

So anyway, now you know why the technology in Jeff's world-especially at the beginning of The Boy Who Fell into the Sky-isn't that much different than our own.

You can find out more about Jeff's world by reading The History of the World of Tomorrow, which is in the Extras section of my web site.

Chad

The Possessor Wars

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