My new Locus column, “Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise,” explores what it means for science fiction when the cost of knowing something falls to zero, and when the difference between knowing something can be done and doing it narrows away to nothing.
Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it — even the firms that specialize in doing it for you.
In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.
This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery.
