The future will still run on instant coffee

People ask me what the future will smell like. They are hoping I will say ozone, or clean air scrubbed of everything human, or nothing at all, a sterile hum with the person filtered out of it. I always disappoint them. It will smell of instant coffee, I say, reheated for the third time in a cup nobody has washed since the last shift. That answer gets a polite silence, so let me make the argument properly.

The mistake I see most often, in the genre I love and in the genre I write, is the belief that the future will be populated by a different species of person. Someone cleaner, calmer, freed by their machines into pure contemplation. It is a lovely idea and it has never once been true of any tool we have invented. The wheel did not make anyone serene. The printing press did not end the argument, it gave the argument more paper. Every device that was going to save us time was immediately handed a longer list of things to do. There is no reason at all to think the starship will be different. Somebody will still be on the late watch, working through a checklist, wishing the coffee were better and the pay were more.

This is not cynicism. It is the opposite. What makes a future feel real on the page is not the size of the explosion, it is the ordinariness that survives around the edges of it. The reader has never crewed a ship, but the reader has absolutely stood at a counter at two in the morning waiting for a kettle, and known exactly how tired the person beside them is by the way they are not talking. Give me that, and I will believe the whole ship. Give me a gleaming bridge where everyone speaks in complete sentences and nobody is hungry, and I will believe none of it, however good the physics.

The physics does have to hold, mind you. I have no patience for a story that waves away its own rules the moment they become inconvenient. But holding the science is only half the job, and it is the easier half, because the science at least sits still while you check it. The harder half is holding the person inside it. A crew that has been out too long does not become nobler. They get short with each other over small things, they hoard the good chair, they develop private theories about who is not pulling their weight. Then the emergency comes, and they are better than they had any right to be, because that is also what people are like. Both of those are true at once, and a story that only knows the first one is a brochure, not a novel.

When the alien finally turns up, and in my books it usually does, there is a form to fill in. Not because I am being funny, though I hope it is a little funny. Because that is what would actually happen. First contact would not be handled by the calmest and wisest of us, chosen by lot. It would be handled by whoever happened to be on shift, working from a procedure written years earlier by someone who never expected it to be used, and it would go slightly wrong in ways nobody thought to plan for, and it would be, in the end, mostly all right. That is the future I trust. Tired people, imperfect coffee, a rule that half fits, and a person deciding, quietly, to do the decent thing anyway.

That last part is the only piece of optimism I allow myself. Everything else stays exactly as annoying as it is now. I see no reason to apologise for it.