If you were to research your own life, using only the tools available to a biographer, what would you discover?
You might start by Googling yourself, building up a picture of your subject’s online persona. Then you might look for physical records of his past – birth and marriage records, university admissions and graduation lists, etc. That’s before you move on to obtaining letters, interviews with family and friends, photographs and juvenilia.
How easy is it to obtain such information? I have no idea. I won’t know until I start researching the made-up biography of myself, written by someone else, that extends into the future – one of the 10 auto/biographies I’d like to write.
This story would be a mixture of autobiography, biography and science fiction. It’d be about me – or a fictional version of me (a character called Ben Hoare) – and would have as its author my would-be biographer, Nigel Savage. Like Ian Hamilton in In Search of J.D. Salinger, Savage is a fan of the author who has dedicated a portion of his life to revealing the truth about his subject. Like many biographers’ tales, then, this would also be a story about a reader’s relationship with a text.
It would be presented as a biography or biographer’s tale and would claim to be true. It’d be made-up in that at least some of it would be consciously fictional. The ‘hero’ of this particular story, Nigel Savage, would be entirely made up, of course.
The story would extend into the future, which is where the science fiction comes in. This book would show us not only what became of Ben Hoare, but also what became of the world. There almost definitely wouldn’t be any teleporting or time travel, but there might be something almost as good. I like the idea of writing about the near, rather than the distant, future. This is the future we know something about – or, at least, can speculate about plausibly. I can imagine a world that has grown beyond me – a world my son is more comfortable in than I am. There will be things I don’t understand, and many of my thoughts will be nostalgic. Technology I now think of as cutting edge will be taken for granted, and many of the tokens of my youth (CDs, DVDs, perhaps even personal computers) will be considered ancient. This is the world I would try to imagine in the made-up biography of myself, written by someone else, that extends into the future.