Is the Dystopian Future One Step Closer To Reality?
Forged Series: The world-building of a dystopian future
To learn more about the FORGED series, visit the Table of Contents.
Iβd written a different piece for this week, but my mental energy has been pulled to another topic after the election results. Donβt worry; Iβll get back to what I already prepared. But for this week, please indulge me.
Is the Dystopian Future One Step Closer To Reality?
Back in July 2024, Jamie Mollart wrote a History of Dystopia essay that struck a chord with me. This quote about dystopian fiction jumped out when I first read it and has continued to replay in my mind, especially after the US 2024 election results.
Stories are a trial run.
Stories are more than a method of simple escapism. Have you ever picked up a novel in the hopes of experiencing a life that is beyond what would occur in your daily life? Of course, you say.
Science has proven that encouraging young people to read will develop vocabulary, knowledge, empathy, critical thinking skills, and more. Engaging in fictional worlds stimulates creative thinking. Analyzing plot twists, character motivations, and themes improves analytical skills.
Reading is also a safe place to improve our emotional resilience, expand our understanding of diverse perspectives, foster deeper compassion for others, and more.
In other words, reading a story is a way to experience something without having toΒ live through an event.
Thereβs no doubt people like to psychologically prepare for real disasters by taking a dry run and Dystopian fiction plays into this beautifully. It acts as a dress rehearsal for potential horrors.1
My dress rehearsal
My favorite stories to read are deep in back story, full of nuances that we may never read on the page but can find woven within the prose.2 I want to feel and see in my mindβs eye why the world is the way it is. This being the case, it might not seem strange that I created an extensive βhistoryβ for my series. I ruminated about the whys and hows and what ifs, sometimes knowing where I wanted to end up and sometimes allowing the reason to be revealed later.
Since my upcoming novel is set 110 years from now in the Pacific Northwest, the world I created is a dystopian take on how society could change. I had to get from βthe here & nowβ to a century from now. Itβs my dry run, a dress rehearsal, of our future should things continue as they areβclimate change, political divisiveness, societal upheaval and division, the importance placed on science vs. politics vs. religionβand how my brain has formulated a possible outcome.
I looked at what happened on August 11, 2017. October 27, 2018. January 6, 2021. June 24, 2022. July 13, 2024.3 From these and other incidents, I envisioned what our country might look like if political radicalization, hate rhetoric, and fomenting division completely broke our society. I layered in an escalation of climate change and environmental instability to make the political upheaval reach a combustion point where a complete dismantling of centralized government occurred.
The United States had been struggling with political unrest for decades. The countryβs two-party system fostered division down party lines, both in the government and in society. The multitude of natural disasters and the physical separation of the North American continent escalated these political conflicts.
In 2059, Rachel Llewellyn, in the last year of her first term as the fifty-first president of The United States, was shot at a campaign rally for a second term. She was the last elected president of the United States. Shortly after her assassination, chaos broke out across the country. The ensuing civil unrest was the last straw.
The National Guard was stretched thin from responding to earthquakes and other disasters plaguing the continent, so when dissidents stormed government buildings, airports, and places of worship, it became a free-for-all. Federal power was transferred to state governments in the hope of keeping social, political, and economic volatility in check. Governors attempted to enact martial law but could not enforce curfews or protect civil functions.
Basically, all hell broke loose as multiple factions, dissatisfied with governmental responses, started to fight for control in their immediate areas. Attempts to maintain a single controlling faction proved unsuccessful, leading to the utter collapse of the central government of the United States. The country was on the verge of another civil war when it formally dissolved in 2062.
Excerpt from The Reshaping of the PacNW: A World Building Docuseries, bonus material from the FORGED Series, coming soon.
Then, I reimagined what would rise from the ashesβa technocratic society centered on scientific knowledge that rejected democracy and political parties to create an autocratic government. Better (yet worse) than where we are today.
This post is public, so feel free to share it. (Someone in your community might be interested too!)
History repeats itself. Again.
In
β Dispatch No. 25, writes about a speech given at a civil rights rally in 1964 in which the words from Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone creator, writer, and narrator), delivered by Dick Van Dyke, spoke of the importance of βweβ over βmeββa message I fear is lost in modern societyβs divisive βbuild-a-wallβ mentality. I encourage you all to take a moment and hop over to read βA Most Non-Political SpeechββIβll wait.Did you listen to the words? Absorb them? If only todayβs American Nationalists could take the time to do the same, maybe our country wouldnβt be such a tinderbox. Maybe hate, violence, and discrimination wouldnβt be normalized and (*gag*) celebrated.
An authorβs responsibility
Words have power. Once Shattered, book one in the FORGED Series is released, I hope you read it. I hope you are entertained. And even more than that, I hope you absorb the message woven within the storyline. That you can feel and see in your mindβs eye where we may already be heading. Let the story take you through the dry run of the whys and hows and what ifs. And then take a moment to reflect on how our elected leaders are walking us down a dangerous path by inciting and normalizing violence, hate, and discrimination. Reflect on how the nationalistic, misogynistic, and xenophobic policies and tactics are dangerous, and then fight like hell to not let my imagined dystopian world become a reality.
Before you go
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Mollart, Jamie. βThe History of Dystopia.β Climate Fiction Writers League. Substack, July 9, 2024.
Prime example? Check out
and her There is Hope serial on her publication! The Human Island, The Seed Grower, The Dust Pirates, and The Initiation are all spin-offs or deep dives within her incredible world.Events and incidents such as the Charlottesville Unite the Right Rally, Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting, and Capitol Insurrection happened before I started or while I was working on the first draft of the manuscript for the FORGED Series. The overturning of Roe v. Wade and an assassination attempt on the Republican presidential candidate at a rally happened after I wrote the manuscript but certainly fit within what IΒ imaginedΒ could happen in our country.
Sometimes writers aren't really prophets but careful observers, just connecting dots the rest of us are too busy to notice.
Itβs that idea about 'we' versus 'me' that really resonatesβhow do you write about a future divided when the present canβt even agree on what happened yesterday? Thank you for sharing.
Great insights! And I see we both have autonomous zones in our novels. I think the first one I read about was in William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy.