Monday, December 31, 2018

The World According To...

Image: Russ Seidel


Authors create their own worlds. It's the job, right? We create the setting, the people, the situations. Sometimes it's completely based on the real world (Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies), sometimes it's partially based on reality (Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), and sometimes it's many light years to the left of reality (Frank Herbert's Dune).

As authors of Parallels: Felix Was Here, we created our own universes. Now suppose you were allowed to bring such a creation to life (and not just in a film or at an amusement park like DisneyWorld's Avatar)? What changes would you make? Here are my top three:





1. A Four Day Work Week

I live in the US. I don't have a job, but I do have two children, one in 9th grade, one in 7th, and I am exhausted. I don't think I can get through three-and-a-half more years on this schedule. We get up at 5 or 6 a.m. because classes start at 7:20 a.m. (No, that is not a typo.) After school, there is an avalanche of homework, doctor's appointments, instrument lessons, instrument practice, play rehearsals, and on and on. It's a race to get out the door in the morning and a race to beat the clock to get to bed at a reasonable hour. (And we lose both of those races at a rate of near 50%.) Getting a Ph.D. and working full-time as a math professor was not this stressful, I swear. (All the time, unfortunately.)

A four-day work week may never happen in this country, but it does exist in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, and Germany.

2. A Sleep Machine


Image: ALT1040


Did I mention my never-ending exhaustion? Let's fix that sucker once and for all, shall we? I'd like a machine in which I could program my desired hours of sleep, plug in, and get those 8 (or 9 or 10) hours of happy, happy dreamtime--guaranteed.

I know, I know, this already exists as Ambien, Lunesta, and other medications, but Rosanne Barr is a cautionary tale on why one shouldn't mix writing (tweet, tweet) with drugs. Enough said.

(I suspect cats have their own internal sleep machines already. Lucky fur balls.)


3. Beam Me Up, or rather, Beam Me Away


Image: Andrew


How cool would it be to have a means for instantaneous teleportation? Forget airport security lines, lost luggage, or even forgotten homework. What if you could go anywhere at any time in just seconds? What a world that would be!

I suppose it would have to come with certain regulations. We can't all zip over to Disney's Expedition Everest roller coaster after school (or Times Square for New Year's Eve, or the beach for lunch hour). But it sure would come in handy, if say, you were in the path of a natural disaster like fire, flood, or hurricane.





The technical side of instantaneous teleportation could have some nifty side effects. Consider the idea of breaking down a human body into particles and then reassembling them. On one hand, there is the fear of mistakes, an idea Micheal Crichton used in Timeline. But what about fixing things in the body? What if such a teleportation machine could be used to instantaneously heal a broken bone, remove a tumor, or rewrite your genes to ferret out certain illnesses? Doctors would go nuts! (But surgeons would have to kiss their scalpels goodbye.)

And then there's the other stuff. The trucking/railroad/air transport industry of moving goods would go the way of the dinosaur. Reduced fossil fuel use would help the environment. Maybe we could transport our garbage to the center of the sun! And imagine storage. What if you could put all your clutter into the equivalent of a data cloud? OMG! No more stacks and stacks of plastic bins filling our garages and basements!

Of course, this is the part of the story where something horrible happens. Let's not forget Stephen King's The Jaunt.

_____________

What things would you come up with for a better universe? What horrible/wonderful consequences might arise from them? Where would you go if instantaneous transformation was possible?


26 comments:

  1. My mother did work a 4-day week for DMV years ago. I'm actually still hoping for a 40 hour day so I can get everything done.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. i am ERIC BRUNT by name. Greetings to every one that is reading this testimony. I have been rejected by my wife after three(3) years of marriage just because another Man had a spell on her and she left me and the kid to suffer. one day when i was reading through the web, i saw a post on how this spell caster on this address AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com have help a woman to get back her husband and i gave him a reply to his address and he told me that a man had a spell on my wife and he told me that he will help me and after 3 days that i will have my wife back. i believed him and today i am glad to let you all know that this spell caster have the power to bring lovers back. because i am now happy with my wife. Thanks for helping me Dr Akhere contact him on email: AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com
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      i am ERIC BRUNT by name. Greetings to every one that is reading this testimony. I have been rejected by my wife after three(3) years of marriage just because another Man had a spell on her and she left me and the kid to suffer. one day when i was reading through the web, i saw a post on how this spell caster on this address AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com have help a woman to get back her husband and i gave him a reply to his address and he told me that a man had a spell on my wife and he told me that he will help me and after 3 days that i will have my wife back. i believed him and today i am glad to let you all know that this spell caster have the power to bring lovers back. because i am now happy with my wife. Thanks for helping me Dr Akhere contact him on email: AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com
      or
      call/whatsapp:+2349057261346

      Delete
  2. Beaming me - or teleporting me - would be awesome!

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm all for the 4-day work week (and no 10-hour days either). And I would love teleportation. Anything to get rid of commute times and traffic.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Teleportation sounds amazing!

    www.ficklemillennial.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. A 4 day week sounds okay, but I'm afraid for a lot of us, it wouldn't make much of a difference, because we work every day anyway.

    I'd love to beam up to anywhere in the world. So many places I'd like to see!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'm with L. Diane Wolfe for the 40 hour day. I never feel like I get enough done. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  7. I sort of do that already. I work 12-hour shifts, but only 3 of them per week. I work nights, though, so it takes time to recover.

    ReplyDelete
  8. A really great article, I enjoyed reading it.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I want those kittens!! Boy, if we could sleep half as much as cats do... I'm so glad two of my kids are in college. They can do their own homework for once!

    ReplyDelete
  10. I would like to go any place I can think of. That would be such an awesome power to have!

    ReplyDelete
  11. How about a peace machine? Maybe it could sprinkle fairy dust and stop world violence. That would be good!

    ReplyDelete
  12. i am ERIC BRUNT by name. Greetings to every one that is reading this testimony. I have been rejected by my wife after three(3) years of marriage just because another Man had a spell on her and she left me and the kid to suffer. one day when i was reading through the web, i saw a post on how this spell caster on this address AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com have help a woman to get back her husband and i gave him a reply to his address and he told me that a man had a spell on my wife and he told me that he will help me and after 3 days that i will have my wife back. i believed him and today i am glad to let you all know that this spell caster have the power to bring lovers back. because i am now happy with my wife. Thanks for helping me Dr Akhere contact him on email: AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com
    or
    call/whatsapp:+2349057261346




    i am ERIC BRUNT by name. Greetings to every one that is reading this testimony. I have been rejected by my wife after three(3) years of marriage just because another Man had a spell on her and she left me and the kid to suffer. one day when i was reading through the web, i saw a post on how this spell caster on this address AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com have help a woman to get back her husband and i gave him a reply to his address and he told me that a man had a spell on my wife and he told me that he will help me and after 3 days that i will have my wife back. i believed him and today i am glad to let you all know that this spell caster have the power to bring lovers back. because i am now happy with my wife. Thanks for helping me Dr Akhere contact him on email: AKHERETEMPLE@gmail.com
    or
    call/whatsapp:+2349057261346

    ReplyDelete
  13. The school here in Boundary County Idaho, goes four days a week.

    ReplyDelete
  14. This is cool, keep it up.👍


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  15. Imagine having holo technology? Like Star Trek's holodeck with a holonovel you can interact with?

    I understand kids coming home from school with a ridiculous amount of schoolwork. That sucks the life out of kids being kids and doesn't really impact their adult lives--right????

    I love the beaming technology but I know the government would find some way to tax the living daylights out of that since traveling by old fashioned cars, planes and trains would be nil. haha

    ReplyDelete
  16. I know what you mean! The whole time I was working at home and dealing with distance learning was way more stressful than simply working at home! Love the teleportation ideas... So many aspects to explore. Timeline was a really good book.

    ReplyDelete
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