I’m deep into writing a science fiction novel set in a post-Singularity world, and lately I’ve been wrestling with an uncomfortable question: What if reality catches up to my fiction before I finish?
As we hurtle toward what increasingly feels like an inevitable technological singularity, I can’t shake the worry that all my careful worldbuilding and speculation might become instantly obsolete. There’s something deeply ironic about the possibility that my exploration of humanity’s post-ASI future could be rendered irrelevant by the very future I’m trying to imagine.
But then again, there’s that old hockey wisdom: skate to where the puck is going, not where it is. Maybe this anxiety is actually a sign I’m on the right track. Science fiction has always been less about predicting the future and more about examining the present through a speculative lens.
Perhaps the real value isn’t in getting the technical details right, but in exploring the human questions that will persist regardless of how the Singularity unfolds. How do we maintain agency when vastly superior intelligences emerge? What does consent mean when minds can be read and modified? How do we preserve what makes us human while adapting to survive?
These questions feel urgent now, and they’ll likely feel even more urgent tomorrow.
The dream, of course, is perfect timing—that the novel will hit the cultural moment just right, arriving as readers are grappling with these very real dilemmas in their own lives. Whether that happens or not, at least I’ll have done the work of wrestling with what might be the most important questions of our time.
Sometimes that has to be enough.
