Dystopian Sci-fi writer will end up writing Star trek eventually
Technically they already are…
“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.”
Back like four years ago when I was at uni, I wrote a real cringy sci-fi short story set in a future where political dissent had been neutered almost completely by a total subversion of language via commodification.
Essentially everything and anything was a brand, “anarchy” was a brand of shoe, even “terror” was a pack of potato chips, and “terrorists” were stans of that pack of potato chips, making it impossible to even talk about any kind of rebellion or alternative thought, and bots would perpetuate these alternative definitions, making it seem like they were more common, sort of like how if you own 51% of some primitive blockchains you can manufacture transactions.
Sufficed to say I’m glad it’s not true, but it’s worrying how consensus reality has collapsed and is now shaped by the few rich and powerful interests, not too dissimilar from what I imagined as a fun hobby creative exercise in imagining the most soulcrushing world imaginable.
It was also just a prologue to a story that featured ‘carbon capture gone wrong’ turning the world into a Sahara-esque desert, through which caravans of brave desert travellers delivered scarce goods between human settlements, assisted by navigators who sit in office buildings and make sure the caravans don’t get lost in the constant sandstorms. Then there was a conspiracy by the main love interest, a Fallout-esque cartoonish A.I. and the navigators’ boss who liked to LARP as a pre-collapse middle manager, they’d drug the navigator crew to keep the protagonist from finding out the shock twist that the travellers are slaves, amongst other things like the fact the rich all left in space rockets, are in contact with earth, live in relative luxury and that there are still functioning rockets on earth.
Also at various stages of conception it had time travel, alt-history and of course - the space shuttle, because autism.
Even if your four-year-old narrative feels a bit “cringy” in retrospect, these sound like really interesting, imaginative, well-thought-out concepts and ideas for sci-fi worlds.
I hope you revisit these ideas in future, or get the chance and inspiration to write again.
This is part of why watching episodes of Trek that ruin the utopian ideas hurts so bad right now.
I wanted that escape to where there were people who always did the right thing and institutions were dependable and honest. The “The Pegasus” hit, with canon black ops. Then the captain nuked a planet…
I like the detail that after 2019, he couldn’t afford another laptop.
Either he can’t afford, or anything for sale is worse than what he already had.
I dunno what is happening faster.
anything for sale is worse than what he already had.
hear hear. 10 year old laptop, still going strong
I’m still rocking the same laptop since 2018.
Hell yeah. For most things (including writing like the article) that should be sufficient. The biggest worry is obviously the battery.
Only laptop I got new was a low-end Razer by winning a raffle. I have a couple other hand-me-downs too, but none of them keep a charge for longer than 5 minutes anymore.
The new meta of dystopian fiction is utopia that we can never have.
So the plot of Elysium? Utopia for the rich and hardcore survival on a dying planet for the poors.
“The future has arrived - it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” -William Gibson
republicans literally talk about the last one as a dystopia
“Telling them lies” lol its called newspapers, radios, and television, which is older than 1999. At least with the invention of smartphones, people can share videos to crosscheck facts (for those willing to seek the truth anyways). the murderer who killed George Floyd would be walking free without a phones with cameras and the internet that allows this to get spread.
2nd panel (2010) is valid tho
As for pandemic? Y’all didn’t pay attention in history class? Black plague? Only thing that stopped them from going worldwide was the travel technplogy was slower (they didn’t have planes)
4th panel (2024) is very USA-Centric, AFIAK the EU doesn’t have such lawless “grab people off the streets” right now.
Nope, and since our governments are virtually all coalitions it’s much more difficult for something like that to happen here. I’m thankful for the style of government my country has, where everyone needs to make concessions. It has its drawbacks, but it does protect the country against this type of power grab.
2nd panel: in 2010, I think jellyfin didn’t exist yet, so there are now better ways to own media, too
This is me. I have three unfinished scifi/horror manuscripts that will probably remain so because I took so long to write them that the future I created would be a boring dystopia if it got published today.
Post apocalyptic stuff still sells, though, or stuff that is so esoteric and far in the future that it’ll be timeless for another 20-50 years.
Time to read The Dispossessed again
Lovely book.
