The history of the future

In the UK the BBC has recently been showing a series titled Full Steam Ahead.  The series traces the start of the railway age in Britain, and how the coming of the railways radically changed the way people lived in this country.

The railways drove the Industrial Revolution, allowing new materials to be moved easily around the country, and allowing finished goods to be moved out.  Fresh food could be put on a train and sold in London a few hours later.  Yorkshire's Rhubarb Triangle is one example of an industry that boomed as a result of railway transport.  Instead of being tied to one tiny part of the country we now had the chance to travel to the coast to take a holiday.  Tourism was born.

I kept finding nuggets of fascinating information throughout the series that jerked up my writer's antenna.  Ideas that I can take and adapt for my own stories with very little alteration.  Then I had an idea for a new novel.  And as I scribbled down ideas I realised the situationI was setting up also had parallels in our history.  

There was the scientist who bioengineered minds for starships and then had ethical objections to how his research was being used.  Hmm.  That sounds a lot like the objections scientists had to using the knowledge of the atom to make a bomb.  

Then there's the issue of whether the artificial intelligences my scientist creates are fully sentient.  And if they are, did his employers have the right to imprison them in starships and force them to work?  That sounds a lot like the old issues of slavery coming around again.

So my story-creating mind is mixing up the real history of our past with the invented history of future humans.  And while I was scribbling down ideas it occurred to me that I ought to pay more conscious attention to the parts of history that I'm mirroring in my tales of the future.  Because recognising that I'm, in essence, writing a story about slavery means I've resolved to go and research the issue in more depth.

I found lots of interesting history in Full Steam Ahead that I'll also use in the future.  This is a case where buying the tie-in book to a TV series really can count as research.  And a case where reinventing the history we already know will bring us our future.