Keeping up with the real world

I've started an rewrite of my novel Snowbird recently.  The original text is over twenty years old, although it's been tinkered with several times since.  And as I was writing it struck me how much real world tech and scientific knowledge has changed in that time.

A large section of the novel takes place on a planet I call Angiris.  I modelled it on Mars, with some tweaks.  Twenty years ago I had no access to the Internet, and very little knowledge about the planet.  The only facts I could get at were in dusty old books about the solar system.  How different things are now!

Contrast that with 2015.  NASA has sent the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers to the planet, and there are three spacecraft orbiting the planet.  We've been mapping and measuring Mars from orbit for a solid decade now.  The spacecraft can see features on the surface as small as a desk, and have recently reported that liquid water may still be intermittently flowing on Mars's surface.  Twenty years ago I wrote about an imagined sunset on Angiris.  Today if I want to see what sunset on Mars looks like I can go to the Internet and download images taken from the surface of the planet.

There have also been massive changes in our knowledge of DNA and genetics, and forensics techniques.  The Hunan Genome Project has sequenced the human genome, and we've sequenced a fair few animal genomes too.  And gene editing is a science fiction idea come true.  Twenty years ago I couldn't even imagine how one could cut out parts of DNA and splice new sections in.

When I first wrote Snowbird I had a skull and bones show up in a power transfer conduit, and I fudged how the man was identified.  Now I've assumed DNA can be taken from the bones and used to sequence his genome. And I've assumed we'll all have our genomes on record, as an ID.  I have a cyborg character who got that way as a result of massive war trauma.  But now we have stem cell regrowth techniques, and I had to justify why his limbs weren't regrown that way.  It made the things he'd suffered even more immoral and horrific.

The other big chunk of the book is about the creation of a sentient AI.  We're still a long way off this, and it's still firmly SF.  It's nice to know that something I'm writing is still imagination, and that the world hasn't completely caught up with me yet.