The importance of divergence…

This week’s comic features some talk about technology and what should and shouldn’t be possible according to the characters’ knowledge, in particular on the topic of “active camouflage” — which in layman’s terms could best be described as being able to disappear into the background a la The Predator, or Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. If you google it you’ll come across some videos of people claiming they’ve already made it happen. These videos tend to be, to put it kindly, “unverified.” I don’t know if you reading this are old enough to remember when the claims of cold fusion made headlines back in 1989, only to fizzle under peer review and remain–so far as anyone knows–unrealized nearly 30 years later.

But technology has a way of blindsiding even the most prescient of futurists and science fiction authors. What if I write a comic like today’s where Rosa claims active camo isn’t possible, and tomorrow I read the real-world headlines that active camo is real?

Well, first I’d be waiting for the cooling off period cold fusion went through (pun intended), but if indeed it turns out to be a real, repeatable, verifiable tech, then I look kind of foolish that I had a tech-savvy character say otherwise, right?

That’s when divergence becomes important.

How to best explain the concept? Well, most settings where superheroes exist in our modern world tend to set a divergence point somewhere shortly before, during, or after World War II, which not coincidentally was the point in our world where superheroes started appearing in popular media. Human history progresses normally up until the point of divergence, but after that point all bets are off.

As exercises in alternative history this can be fascinating in of itself and also allow for positively Kirbyesque flights of fancy, but a very practical reason is entwined in this process as well. For Zombie Ranch, I have taken a snapshot of our world as it existed in the early 21st Century and started riffing on it from there, which means now I don’t feel burdened by the need to continually update based on current real-world technological advances. Instead, the advent of the zombie apocalypse gives me the freedom to say, for example, that Tech Aspect A is further along now than we may ever know in our own lifetimes, but Tech Aspect B remains stagnant or retrograde even though we in the real world might tomorrow be enjoying its benefits (or cursing its problems).

Divergence allows for an uncoupling of the reality you require for your story from the reality you’re living through, and I feel is nearly mandatory when you’re dealing with a modern or near future setting. Will active camo be a thing on the battlefields of tomorrow? Is it already a thing, just not available to the public? Will it just prove completely unfeasible to implement?

As a certain wizard of Middle-Earth once said: “even the very wise cannot see all ends.” Diverge, and you can just fit your ends to justify your means.