Our Dystopia
Having written three novels that range from dystopian to outright apocalyptic, I’m trying hard to write more optimistic science fiction and fantasy these days. Skipping right past my fear that optimism isn’t really in my wheelhouse, I have a couple reasons for making this switch. One is that I’ve more or less ended the world or civilization as we know it in three books, it feels time to do something different. The second more important reason is that I feel that it’s essential for fiction to cultivate our aspirations as well as our fears.
Looking at the world we live in, this weird, terrible twisted era, it really seems like it’s important to write something positive. Maybe aspirational science fiction is escapism now. But maybe people will read the aspirational science fiction and it will seed new ideas and people will strive for something more.
It’s possible too that my lack of desire to write another dystopia is a matter of laziness or surrender. After all how does one write a dystopia that is actually worse than reality when reality keeps resetting the bar? Recently the calendar clicked past the Bladerunner date, and I couldn’t help but think, this was dystopian fiction? Flying cars, rain in L.A., great street food, lots of available housing, off world colonies? Hell, the Bladerunner world even has the technology to provide basically free labor if it weren’t for some damned mad man at Tyrell Corp programming in emotions to the machines to the point that it presents a moral quandary.
And then there is this fear I had. Having grown up reading dystopias and Philip K Dickian weirdness, I look around now and it seems like all the dystopias are happening at once. The Handmaid’s Tale’s world of religious misogyny is mixed in with John Shirley’s Eclipse’s American fascists, all with a 1984 like surveillance state and corruption of the truth, with generous heapings of any number of Philip K Dick fever dream nightmares and Douglas Adams style bureaucratic logical twistings, and with just a disturbing pinch of a John Waters midnight movie era ookiness.
This got me thinking: did we do this to ourselves? Did we write so many dystopias thinking that we were warning readers of what could happen only to make it happen? Have we inverse Man In The High Castled ourselves? Have we Tlon Uqbard ourselves?
Can we undo the way things are with fiction? I don’t know, but I’m going to try. At the very least, if I write better worlds, I’ll get to spend some time in them.
