Writing the semi-near future looks hard
My most recent book club book got me thinking about the difficulties of writing science fiction set only about twenty years in the future. If it's set "five minutes from now, with one wild card invention," you can write the world pretty much as it is. If it's set fifty or more years in the future, it's far enough out that any number of changes in
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(It was Timescape by Gregory Benford.) There were brief mentions of people doing...something?...about all the catastrophes, but not about who was actually doing the (apparently unsuccessful) work. (Not the hands-on parts, anyway. We heard a lot about the creepy administrator guy.) And then I think there was something about a program where spouses could share jobs, because there wasn't enough work. Maybe just white-collar work? I don't know, it was unclear. I got the feeling the author didn't care that much. But the university office politics were spot-on (based on what some of my academia-affiliated acquaintances said) thanks to his experience with them, so there's that! And I did like how it portrayed doing science as actual work, not just waiting around for inspiration to strike. You fiddle with the machinery and run experiments, get weird results, try to fix the machinery, run the experiments again, wonder what the hell is going on with the results... The good parts were really interesting, which made the rest even more frustrating.
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