Paul Braddon: The Actuality

Some of it is obvious: we can expect more extreme temperatures. England I depict as colder in winter, because of the failure of the Gulf Stream, but Paris milder and the Austrian Alps relatively balmy, despite it being still only January when Evie visits. The more extreme impacts on southern lands are to be indirectly witnessed such as through Evie’s glimpse of the vast camps for immigrants she passes in the train after crossing into France.

I think we can expect man-made pollution to have had a significant deleterious impact on the food chain, with increased contamination of agricultural and fishery produce. From this, it seems not unreasonable to assume that fertility will decline, birth defects increase and, in general, life expectancy shorten. The effect would be a population in sudden steep decline.

The resulting deterioration in economic activity would lead to increased hardship, in extreme cases reminiscent of the early industrial age. I enjoyed including imagery of Victorian horses and carts alongside the state-of-the-art, such as the hovacar stolen by Daniels with its holo-guidance system.

Buildings and infrastructure require continuous maintenance – steel rusts, concrete fractures and roots squeeze into the resulting cracks and expand. It has been shown in studies of the area around Chernobyl, abandoned just thirty years ago, how quickly the modern world backslides when left to its own devices. In The Actuality, under-occupied tall buildings, many over a century-and-a-half old, have become unsafe and complex transport systems are failing. The London Underground, so dependent on being pumped dry twenty-four hours a day, is drowning under rising water levels, making it hard to get around.

Under all this pressure, society is fragmenting and becoming insular, with communities shunning strangers – you get a glimpse of this when Evie and Daniels pass through a barrier at the end of the canal path erected by the local East End estate. On a national level, the UK now comprises only England and Wales – Scotland and Northern Ireland having gone their own ways – a scenario which may soon not be so imaginary.

But not all are losers. Apart from the option of hiding away like Matthew, those agile enough to adapt would be able to reap the benefits that technological advance brings. In The Actuality this has led to pockets of affluence, such as Cambridge, wedged uncomfortably alongside a crumbling society powered by human toil. The outcome would be civil unrest and its inevitable concomitant heavy-handed policing, and even the unworldly Evie quickly becomes aware that the main purpose of the police in 2130 is to protect the haves from the have-nots.

Technology in The Actuality

Technological advances, in just a few years, have created pocket devices thousands of times more powerful than the original room-sized mainframes, and the pace is accelerating. The internet as we know it is still just in its early twenties – no more than a young adult. What will the next ten years hold? The next twenty? The next fifty?

Evie is created in 2091, seventy-two years from the time of writing. For certain there will have been fundamental breakthroughs by then, transforming science fiction into everyday fact. Bioengineering, perhaps the next frontier, will surely be generating new substances and structures to far surpass the humble limits of traditional materials.

Artificial intelligence will fuel this, with AI entities sharing and learning and then harnessing that knowledge to improve upon themselves in a virtuous loop. It is fiercely debated among scientists whether these entities will ultimately achieve ‘consciousness’, and what even that means, but from their inception they will be capable of independent analysis and decision making, the usefulness and safety of which will be completely dependent on how well their goals are programmed.

Such entities of course do not require a human-shaped shell, and in many ways such a structure would be limiting. On the other hand, a familiar exterior, a mirror unto ourselves, would facilitate interaction and the commercial applications are more than obvious, indeed they would be screaming out to corporations like Realhuman.

In The Actuality , the lowest of such devices are the mannequins collected by Maplin, designed to assist humans but limited both physically and intellectually. Above them are advanced service models, such as the assistant David and Evie encounter on the train, programmed to perform repetitive tasks with dexterity but not to go further. Above them are the so called AABs – Artificial Autonomous Beings – able to operate independently, the most sophisticated of which are physically indistinguishable from humans. At the top of the pyramid are those AABs which have had the opportunity to develop human-like thought processes and the associated messy baggage of conscience and morality. These are the legacy of a braver time, before a global crackdown. Very few still exist. Some of those that do are in private hands, as Evie is at the start of the novel, some are corporately owned like David and some, like Yuliya, having outlived their original owners, survive below the radar.

First of all, thanks to Joanna Swainson, my agent, for believing in me and making this possible.

Thanks to everyone at Sandstone Press and in particular my super-talented editor, Kay Farrell, who always knows what is needed and has a nice way of asking.

Thanks to my friends and family for being patient over the years and have read my previous work. You know who you are and I know who you are!

And of course thanks to Mary and Thomas – who have had to put up with me talking about all of this for far too long and have been so enthusiastic about my success. This is my dream come true.

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First published in Great Britain by

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright © Paul Braddon 2021

Editor: K.A. Farrell

The moral right of Paul Braddon to be recognised as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-913207-16-8

ISBNe: 978-1-913207-17-5

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh