The future's all right (On writing a YA in a non-dystopic future)

So, there's a glut (flood? Swarm? Stampede?) of dystopian young adult coming out or being kicked around. That means that if someone wants to write a speculative fiction young adult novel and sell it, they REALLY should be looking into writing a utopian novel, so that one can stand out from the crowd, just as a peacock is more noticeable when surrounded by gray blobs of depression and bullets.

But wait, the cry goes, writing about a utopia would be boring. No one would have to do anything. They'd just be sitting around eating cakes! There has to be a problem to overcome, something to do, or the narrative goes nowhere and your readers hurl your book into a trash compactor.

This is true, of course!

So, we'll have to set our sights slightly lower and instead simply write about a future that doesn't suck and offers exciting storytelling possibilities. What do I mean by a future that doesn't suck?

It's easier to define what does not happen.

No mega-deaths
No catastrophic social collapses
No systemic failures of infrastructure
No global thermal-nuclear war
No pandemic
No unfriendly hard-takeoff singularity events
No asteroid impacts
No runaway population growth

And for the love of god, no fucking zombies.

Marry this with advances in technology and their implementation for fun and profit and you get a world where people live healthier, longer, better lives than today - just as people today live healthier, longer, better lives than yesteryear.

So, what kinds of interesting narratives can we tell in this 'non-sucky' settings that would be of interest to young adult readers?

Here are some ideas.

AlwaysJuly said:

Yeah, I tend to think we can project forward to an imperfect-but-not-horrific future and find plenty of storylines to write. The future's going to look a lot like the present, only with some things better and some things worse, and we probably still won't have those damn flying cars I've been promised.

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You could always set your story on Mars!

Mars can have flying cars, thanks to it's lighter gravity and, until it's been settled for centuries, it won't be nearly as populated and messy with air traffic and such.

I actually had an idea about a disenfranchised youth on a Mars where a rapid influx of poor have arrived to build trans-martian railroads

(railroads are useful for transporting bulk cargo, and Martian cities would be quite compact, making them perfect)

So, they run away from the city to join with the "rednecks", who are people that don't live in the cities, surviving by sucking permafrost out of the ground and using small hydroponic bays to grow food. Most of them get their technical components by trading services and local knowledge to the domers (people who live in domes, obviously) as they have explored more of the planet than the others, and can stake claims on resource deposits and good settlement sights and sell those to domers.

But then there are some who rob trains!

So the main character falls in with the bandits, but learns that the real life and the romantic ideal of barsoomian bandits are far from meeting.

And, hey, if the trains are steam powered, then it'd be more effective to use nuclear reactors instead of coal (do you know how hard it is to find coal on mars!?) and so the bandit leader could be stealing nuclear material to make a dirty bomb...that'll definitely make the damn domers listen, eh?

It's an interesting idea, but I find it highly unrealistic, specially when technology is so damn useful and all pervasive...

But, hey, it's another thing to write down.

Asari are overrated.

KTC said:

That's what I do. I like contemporary setting. So sue me. (-:

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Hey, nothing we write is real. It's either fantastic or an off brand substitute for real that involves more cool things that what normally happens.

Frankly, contemporary is a steal. It's like real life, but cheaper, and less fattening!

And here is another long, rambling idea post!

###

It's THE FUTURE, and unlike everything predicted by people in the 1990s, corporations didn't become mega-corporations, hyper-corporations, or even super-corporations. Nope. They crashed and burned, unable to keep up with the radically increased speed of the economic landscape and the sudden lack of scarcity.

Government's crashed and burned later, their attempts to control people and their lives leading to people leaving en masse. Why stay in a city when you can just head out into the wilderness with a fabber and live free? And the internet was so integrated and spread that they didn't even need to stop communicating with their friends. The armies sent out to force people back to work switched sides.

Why fight to save a system that leaves you shoeless when there is a promise of material wealth for everyone and true freedom?

Everything settles down into a sprawling patchwork of hundreds of thousands of ministates, created and sustained by popular opinion. They mostly fall along nano-socialist and anarcho-libertarian lines, and are at peace. The only true 'statist' countries that are left are just a haven for people who get off on control...and the people who get off on being controlled.

And needless to say, they're always offered the medicine and psychosurgery that can fix that mental disorder, but, hey, they're free to...not be free if they want.

So, a common tactic for raising children is to send them on walkabout. Give them a fabber, a weapon, some armor, and have them head out through all the states, experiencing all the shades of humanity. They'll visit furry-topias, where humanoid animals roleplay elaborate fantasies; Jungian Complexes, where collections of people lay in stasis chambers and have their subconcious minds interfaced with short ranged radios, creating a share and very surreal dreamscape; Party Communes, where all is shared and everyone works for the betterment of humanity (what that means exactly depends on the Commune in question).

Everyone is free to switch society if they want too. People have learned that it's just...not worth keeping someone around. If they hate their life, they can always complain to a neighbor, whose in a different minisociety, who will start complaining, and sudden your entire minisociety is cut out of the global network as everyone shames you.

They're fine with racist dictatorships, so long as everyone who follows them actually WANTS to be led by a racist dictator.

And not many people invade. They run fantasy campaigns, sometimes, but an actual invasion will rapidly lead to various minisocieties testing out their fancy new weapon tech on you. And since no society is really huge (most of the more popular variations tend toward being small scale, so they naturally split themselves up) there's no Russian Tactic (I.E, drown your enemy with warm bodies and hope you win).

So, anywho, the main character would be a teen from a Mind-Net (think the Borg, but sexier and less pointlessly evil) who is going on walkabout. He or she is trying to figure out what its like to be an individual, and they meet a freewheeling teen from an anarchist society that promotes artistry and sculpture.

They hit it off and decide to take their walkabout to the most exciting place. They've read about all these minisocieties in high definition 3d full immersion simulations...why walk there when one can go to the Belt!

Yes, the Belt, where a lot of the world's new resources come (most things are recycled, or built to LAST). It's an exciting place, where people are truly independent.

So they hire on with an asteroid jockey society and zip off to the Belt to mine rocks.

But unknown to humanity, something is approaching the solar system. The discovery comes a week or so after our heroes arrive in the belt, with several astrological oddities are realized to not be supernovas or anything like that...but rather ENGINE plumes from massive starships.

Communication flickers from the ships to various human societies, and the net buzzes: The aliens have been observing us, and they have an old language (English) down pat...and they think that we still have something called a UN and want this UN to surrender?

Seems these aliens were in the same boat that we were in in the 21st century...but their two superpowers managed to stay up and fighting, rather than having one of them fall apart. That spurred a faster and faster space race WITHOUT the mega-systems collapsing under their own weight. Strict control beat nanotech into a small corner, and the civilization exists by taking worlds, strip mining them, and shipping the materials back to their homeworld via a system of massive rail guns built on their slave worlds.

It's inefficient. It's stupidly expensive. It's very statist.

And now they have their sights on Earth, the third gem in their growing Imperial Crown.

As the minisocieties back home burst into a semi-unified defense, the Belters realize that they're the first line of defense from a horrific ground war...and if those ships get into orbit around the Earth, their railguns can smash billions of lives into ash and smoke and kick back the terraforming efforts hundreds of years.

Well...our heroes wanted an adventure.

It looks like they have it.

Go for it. Two people can write the same story in vastly different ways, and I'm fine with anyone getting inspired or excited and such with my ideas.