Back during the Cold War, the fringe scifi writers thought the commies would win because many of them were socialists and were continually told that feeling is the same as doing, meaning the idealists did very little to make it work, the Russians spent all their time drunk, and which is why the commies lost the war eventually. That and they couldn't get hard currency to buy stealth weapons to fight the West on even footing. We outspent them and they lost. Russia remains a third world country run by villains. So much for scifi predictions. But you have to write them, just the same. It's what scifi readers want. If you don't give them what they want, they won't buy it. And that's the point of writing scifi: get paid.
I mostly wrote my ideas from dreams, many of them nightmares, and used my experiences of human cruelty and viciousness to give believable edge to them. I also study most of my waking hours and stay current on international news, since those lead to eventual wars. Business men use our troops to kill officials who won't take the offered bribes to exploit their citizens into slavery or poisoned water or famine. Our troops are called heroes, and are told various things, but its really about who got in the way of the evil man in the business suit. Business men rarely have morals or ethics. They see the low hanging fruit, the profit, and murder and genocide are both just fine, just tools to get the profit. Its terrible. Its part of the reason I'm happy working in a Fair Trade company. No slavery or exploitation allowed. I have too many moral scruples to operate in a traditional corporation today. Yes it still works by profit motive. If they don't grow and harvest product, they don't get paid.
Many of my dreams have really odd settings which require a lot of explaining, and you want to do that cleverly, "show" not "tell". The extreme end of genetic engineering is humans who use few resources and successfully out-breed their competition, other humans, often killing them like rats if they prefer quantity over quality. This is how most of the world views child soldiers, btw. They're quantity. They can, with great effort, become human beings again, but mostly we just shoot them on sight. They have great reflexes so we mustn't give them the chance to shoot ours first. Or worse, offer them visas through the State Department so they can blow up our marathons or fly planes into our buildings. That's what child soldiers do. Terrorism is their forte.
A good scifi writer can predict these insane and largely unthinkable events and write about that. Readers want shock and awe. In my original version of my novel The Fall, North Koreans put a nuke in a shipping container and when it was opened in Alameda, it nuked San Francisco, ignited the Richmond Refineries into firestorm, and then the fallout poisoned the Delta. Those are some of the richest farmlands on Earth, and it starved a billion people to death in China and Japan thanks to our rice fields getting poisoned. Thus freeing North Korea to invade the South, the entire point of the war. We were just a distraction.
I also had Arab terrorists with a nuke in their fishing trawler cross into Galveston Bay and set off the nuke, burning the refineries there, causing panic and collapse of the rest of the USA due to lack of gasoline. Just In Time inventory is major weakness. A Rand (cold war think tank) study covered that potential sneak attack and its consequences. I met one of the study's authors in college. Really smart guy, was marrying one of the nice girls in my class. I just repeated it for my novel. Of course, everyone said the Arabs would NEVER attack America. Then we got their bombing of the World Trade Center, but the building didn't fall down. Lots of smoke inhalation. Mohammed Salameh needs to be tortured every single day because he gave the 9/11 hijackers the idea. Its not okay for him to have peaceful incarceration. Allah must hear his pleas for mercy. After 9/11 submarines and Coast Guard now scan ships and boats for gamma rays, which you can't shield very well, indicating if a nuke is on board, 60 miles out to sea. This is a REAL THING they actually do. It would stop the thing I predicted in my novel.
I had dreams of an empty India, with tigers and leopards running around and human bones everywhere. In that scenario, a plague had been targeted at Indian people, at their specific genome pattern and accidentally killed them all. It all began with a Pakistani genetic engineer whose girlfriend was murdered by her family for shaming herself because she was Hindu and he was Muslim. This is an event that actually happened, btw. I just made him competent at revenge. So he engineers a super-targeted Smallpox, something Indian people aren't immunized against and goes after them specifically, ignoring everyone not Indian. In months, all were dead and after the fallout from retaliatory nukes faded and the cleanup begun, people from around the rest of the world ventured in a few years later, exploring the ruins. Turns out the plague killed the Tibetans too and the Nepalese because they're also sharing enough genes it got them as well. Bones everywhere, marked by GPS for later collection and burial/cremation/recycling into fertilizer. We can't waste all that phosphorus. Explorers carry GPS smartphones and guns because the Leopards and tigers both have a taste for people and will eat you given a chance.
I want to write this novel because it would make a fantastic warning against the dangers of unregulated genetic code experimentation, something which SHOULD be regulated and treated as the weapon it could be. These same jackasses fuss about aimable weapons like firearms, ignoring the plague potential of genetic weapons anybody can buy, unrestricted, and for not that much money. My former employer would probably have offered a volume discount to an engineer buying smallpox virus parts. They wouldn't care how it could be used. They sell to a rather well known example of bio-plague experimentation without regulation by the FDA, threatening many local crops and all sorts of people, after all. Regulation is needed in that industry. Synthetic DNA is much more dangerous than guns. And can save just as many lives as they take. We need moral people doing the work though. Evil should have no access to this stuff. It's too dangerous.
A pity that the anti-gunner senators are too busy taking bribes from the Pharma-coms to actually think about the potential harm or long term horrors this technology has. Which is why scifi authors have to do it and scare people into forcing senators to deal with this real weapon of mass destruction or be replaced.
Scifi, after all, is a kind of journalism. It changes the world by showing you what CAN be. Smart phones are the direct reflection of Star Trek Tricorders. Hilarious, but true. I've like to see serious no-shit you are under arrest regulators investigating these biotechs and who they're selling to. Billions of lives are at risk. Bioterrorists really don't need to know that much to assemble a weapon that spreads to everyone. Dump it into the air at an airport and however long after that a million people are infecting another 100 people each. Do the math. That's really frightening. Warning people with a nasty and graphic outcome, that's what I can do.
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