In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.

Cory Doctorow, in the science fiction magazine Locus.

Excerpt:

“Invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery. Bruce Sterling’s new Imaginary Inventions project is seeking to catalog the imaginary inventions of fiction, hucksters, failed entrepreneurs, and other imaginers. I sent him some excerpts from my forthcoming novel Makers (Tor, HarperCollins UK, Fall 2009), which concerns hardware hackers whose principle activity is thinking up stuff that would be cool, then googling to figure out how to build it, and Bruce replied,

There’s hardly any engineering. Almost all of this is mash-up tinkering. It’s like the Burroughs cut-up method applied to objects. These guys are assembling hardware in the same crowd-pleasing spaghetti at the wall approach that Web 2.0 web designers use in assembling features and applications.

That’s exactly right. That’s the plausible premise right there — spaghetti-at-the-wall hacking that assembles, rather than invents. It’s not that every invention has been invented, but we sure have a lot of basic parts just hanging around, waiting to be configured. Pick up a $200 FPGA chip-toaster and you can burn your own microchips. Drag and drop some code-objects around and you can generate some software to run on it. None of this will be as efficient or effective as a bespoke solution, but it’s all close enough for rock-n-roll.

Plausible premise invention is everywhere. Look at the incredible games flying out of Seattle’s Valve Corporation: Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Left 4 Dead — all built on the same engine with radically different narratives and play mechanics and atmosphere, a GURPS approach to game design that shrugs off the macho business of creating your own 3D engine from scratch in favor of pulling something down off the shelf and remixing it.

What does this all mean for science fiction? Well, it probably means that SF writers are going to get credited with a lot more invention than we’re accustomed to. The formerly rare occurrence of technology jumping off the page and into the world (Heinlein’s waterbeds, Clarke’s geosynchronous orbits) are about to become a lot more common. When readers can download or mail-order off-the-shelf components and instructions for integrating them, it becomes much simpler to turn fiction into reality.”