There's one variety, which I think is called Hard Sci-fi, where writers describe far away worlds on far away planets, in great detail with family trees, different architecture, and three or more pink moons rising. The whole process is called World Building.
The more excruciatingly and weirdly detailed the story is, the more the writer is praised. My own thought is that this type of sci-fi has to be done really well.
This approach has never interested me, probably because I'm a traditional novelist who now and then writes about sci-fi subjects, such as AI and robots.
The new novel, Frankie, is set on a college campus in New Jersey. The story could occurr a few years from now. I call this present-day sci-fi or soft sci-fi. In other words, something that might actually happen and could relate to your life.
The interesting thing is that Elon Musk is making many dire predictions. He says that 5 or 10 years from now, AI could easily destroy us. This could happen because the computers are faster, the search engines are more ingenious, and the algorithms are more unpredictable. Today’s AI is more powerful precisely to the degree that you let it loose to find the best answer. And that's where the biggest danger is.
But do not worry that Frankie will focus on those thoughts. Frankie is intrigued by the bizarre events that will happen because humans and robots misunderstand each other.
The cover of Frankie says: "Experts are baffled as many people die in a college town. Cause of death: unknown.”
I've noticed that people tend to guess that Frankie must be a murderer. But if the story is that obvious, why would anyone want to write it? The whole point of a mystery is to generate mystery.
The jacket copy reveals: “Simon, a grad school drug dealer, falls in love with Frankie. He thinks she is spiritually advanced and he can create a cult around her.”
I've been tracking robotics for 40 years, on a casual non-professional level. Four years ago I dreamed about a young woman walking on the other side of a highway from me. She seemed lost or somehow ill at ease. Maybe she was running away from something… Then I wondered, could this be a robot? And that ambivalence, that total uncertainty, fascinated me and when I woke up I decided to write a book about that woman. I decided her name was Frankie.
In the months since Frankie was published, I've had a change of heart about genres in general. Each one requires its identifying traits. Author and readers are locked in.
I now think that Frankie is mystery, suspense, speculative, robot, romance, academic, thriller, and maybe some others. The summation is Literary. I now think that Frankie is not that good considered as example of one particular genre. Fans of any particular genre might be disappointed. Frankie has too much space, too much irony, too much originality, too much quirkiness. Those are qualities we want, traditionally, in the novel.
Here's how I recommend the book now. If you go into a bookstore asking for whatever is new and different, please consider Frankie.
For more info, visit Frankie.zone
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In 1972, while doing my doctoral dissertation, I wrote a computer program that had a database of philosophical statements that were self improving as the database was used. In other words, new statements could be entered by users of the program, better than the originals, and statements that were never used or meant anything to the users, would be eventually discarded.
My idea of a self learning program is what is referred to as AI today. I still find that most of the robot programs I encounter when calling companies, while they have pleasant voices, are really stupid when it comes to helping like a human would at a help desk.
BTW. I write all kinds of science fiction. And every once in a while drop in a little bit of fantasy. But I don't create fantastical worlds that never will be. For example, in the recent anthology, Escape from Reality, I entered two stories. The first one was a guy like Elon Musk creating a much smarter clone of himself, and the second was a semi-realistic explanation for Bigfoot.
Ron