We live in a world where cars can talk to refrigerators, and a robot on Mars sends messages to a supercomputer I keep in my pocket, and yet despite all of this I never fully realized how much technology had changed the world until I read a story about a professional video-game player getting an athletic visa to travel to a tournament. Video games are sports now. I don’t know why, but that’s what finally did it for me. The online world has subsumed the physical one. We live in the future.
This book is the first of what I hope will be a very long series, combining three of my favorite things in life: reading, games, and Mexican food. Even more than that, though, this series is about disruption: technologies and ideas that change the way we live our lives, sometimes for the better and sometimes much, much worse, but always looking forward and striving for something new. Disruption asks us hard but necessary questions: Why is my society/government/world/life the way it is? Do I like it that way? What would be a better way, and how do I make that happen? Or maybe we simply ask: What happens if I do this? And then live with the consequences. Writing a book about the future forced me to look at every different branch of science I could think of—programming and engineering and biology and fuel and robotics and genetics and so many more, but the most important one is the social science: How do we react when things change? And the corollary to that, if we’re smart enough to think about it: How can we change things so that we get the reaction we want?
In the process of asking those questions I had some really amazing conversations with people much smarter than I am; some of them, though I’m certain I’m leaving some out, are Steve Diamond, Claudia Gray, Josiah Happel, Michael Happel, Mary Robinette Kowal, Gama Martinez, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, Rebecca McKinney, Patrick Miller, Ben Olsen, Maija-Liisa Phipps, Alexander Robinson, Brandon Sanderson, Eric Sumner, Howard Tayler, Natalie Whipple, and Stacy Whitman. Some of them I approached with specific questions, and others might be wondering why they’re included here, but their ideas and friendship were invaluable, and I couldn’t have written this book without them. Further thanks must be given to my agent, Sara Crowe; my editor, Jordan Brown; and of course my wife and children. They’re the best.