Clive Cussler's 1993 in Dragon

From quite early on Clive Cussler got in the habit of setting his Dirk Pitt novels a few years ahead into the future, so as to offer some latitude for the political and technological changes without which his scenarios would not be as plausible, especially in the case of novels like Night Probe! (1981)--or Dragon (1990). Part I of the latter novel incorporates in Cussler's version of 1993 undersea mining stations 16,000 feet down with all their apparatus and vehicles, and satellites with sensors which can render the oceans effectively transparent to investigators, with these things not merely interesting gimmicks but indispensable to the unfolding of the plot--while the technology gets only more exotic from there, not least where the robotics are concerned.

Of course, not only did we not have that stuff in 1993, we do not have it in 2023, and at this much later date are unsure that we ever will. (This applies even to another technology critical to the unfolding of the plot of Dragon, autonomous cars.)

Considering the fact it seems to me reflective of the line between "techno-thriller" and "science fiction" having been thinner for '70s-era techno-thriller writers like himself, or his contemporary Martin Caidin (who like Cussler, was fond of writing in not just imaginary technology but cryptohistory and cryptoarchaeology, as seen in The Messiah Stone, or the third of his Steve Austin novels, High Crystal).

The differentiation of the two genres also seems to have gone with the techno-thriller writers becoming more intent on persuading the reader that their fiction was in fact well-grounded. A Tom Clancy, for example, who did read Clive Cussler, and in some cases seemed to follow his footsteps (I suspect Cussler's influence when I look at Debt of Honor), never expected his readers to take seriously anything like Dragon's undersea mining station, or presented his spy satellites as able to peer through the sea that way--and while some of what he envisioned has since come to seem science fiction-al (as with his conception of anti-missile defenses in The Cardinal of the Kremlin), these were lapses, in this case a product of the wildly overblown '80s-era hype about them by which Clancy was taken in, even as he generally strove to "get the details right" to a much greater degree than Cussler did. (Clancy generally purported to write about real technologies, while Cussler, especially in his earlier books, did not hesitate to make things up even when he did not have to do so. Thus in Deep Six an "F/A-21" fighter plane launched "laser-guided" anti-ship missiles at a key part of the narrative. The U.S. did not have, even on the drawing board, F/A-21 fighter planes or laser-guided anti-ship missiles that would have been launched from such, and such would never have appeared in a Clancy novel.)

However, it seems to me there may be more than the care to "keep things grounded" and "get the details right" differentiating them--especially from the standpoint of a reader looking back. They might scoff at Cussler's seaQuest-like undersea mining station, or the advanced robotics of the tale, but such stations were supposed to be a near-term possibility when Cussler began writing his books, while there was a lot of hype about robotics, and the artificial intelligence controlling them, back in the '80s, and especially what Japan was supposed to be accomplishing in that field. (Remember, fifth-generation computing was going to change the world!) Expectations in both these areas (like the expectations in regard to anti-missile defense) have become more modest as we became habituated to the generally lowered expectations of an era of technological stagnation in which the "techno" became less thrilling than it seemed just a short time earlier.