With today’s announcement about the Galaxy 5 phone, I couldn’t resist posting a bonus writing prompt.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Douglas Adams’ writing. I remember laughing along when Marvin, the Paranoid Android, was plunged deeper into despair by a ‘door with personality’, which stopped to tell him how happy it was to open for him. In the early 1980s this seemed like the height of farce. Who would ever come up with something like that?!

Twenty years later I put some trash in a mall food court and the trashcan said, “Thank you”!!

Seventeen years ago I wrote a story in which something very much like Google Glass was the going out of fashion in favor of similarly equipped contact lenses or, better yet, retinal implants. Last year we started to move into the futuristic era I’d written about.

Yesterday, the latest Samsung phone was released and is equipped with technology that can tell when you take your eyes off the screen (apparently it’ll pause your video for you, and I’m sure someone will come up with an even more awesome application for that in due course).

The Prompt

Write A Good Old Fashioned Paranoid 1950s Futuristic Story About The Rise of Technology/Surveillance/Man vs. Machine

Tips

• You don’t have to actually be paranoid. You are free to point out the positives.
• Take one technology, extrapolate it and think about the implications for daily life (e.g. if we really all did have flying cars by now what would our physical world look like? Not like it does now, with as many roads as we have. See The Boston Big Dig for inspiration as to how a city could look without roads. This was an elevated highway when I lived there in the mid 90s)
• Show the small, everyday ways technology affects one character, one family, one event.

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