So one of the things about Theadia is that the Day Job for the two main characters is that of coding. Althea works on system translators and special projects, and Claudia works on transportation and communication hardware. So suffice it to say, they know a bit about how things work under the hood, and that becomes their superpower as the story progresses. I based my approach towards their Day Jobs on my own position at my Former Day Job, in which I’d learned what’s under the hood in e-commerce banking. In effect, their story isn’t just about the technology but also compliance, safety and just plain making sure it doesn’t explode in your face.
Thing is, I’d decided early on that what I didn’t want was for the novel to be one large technology infodump. Some people like that kind of thing — and Cory Doctorow does it really well, perhaps overly so — but I knew I wouldn’t. That wasn’t the kind of story I wanted to write. I’d decided that I’d infodump only when absolutely necessary, and so far that’s only been in a few very important scenes. I wanted to make it digestible to the normal reader who might not want that tech deep dive. That also came from the Former Day Job: having to explain tech to someone who doesn’t have the mind for it.
There’s also the fact that not everyone is a technological genius in their field. Sure, there are those out there who are absolutely brilliant at what they do, but there are also those out there whose approach is more of a ‘crossing-fingers-and-hoping-it-works’. And if I’ve learned anything from the Former Day Job, that’s not from a lack of knowledge but more from the reality that, as I’ve said numerous times over the years, systems are only as smart as those who program them. It’s often a LOT uglier under the hood than you’d imagine. Legacy systems that won’t talk to each other unless they’re linked by translators, coding languages that are so old they probably predate some employees, intellectual properties that refuse to work in tandem, platforms whose navigation feels counterintuitive, and so on. But hey, if they still work, why change ’em, right?
That’s how I make the tech world of Theadia believable. It’s not about the fancy and nerdy hacking but knowing and understanding what’s under that hood…and how to manipulate it when necessary.
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