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I've been reading a friend's book (Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning; it's lovely and the Cushing and Todd are mentioned in the Acknowledgements, so go get it) and regretting how I haven't made more time for fiction-writing these last few years. I've finished, what, a story a year, on average, I think? Which isn't the worst, it just makes me sad because I remember how easy it used to be, and how lovely it was to escape for a while.
And that brings me to the news today, and Orlando--and Tel Aviv, and ye gods, just, everything, like, seriously, Humanity get your fucking shit together already, godsfuckingdammit!
And somehow that got me to thinking about the idea of a better world, a utopia, and of course Thomas More's Utopia, which is problematic. And there's the saw about how utopias never make good stories, so then I got to thinking about how one COULD make a good story about utopia that wasn't, you know, Star Trek. And of course More's book was also a volume on political philosophy and, I think we could argue about this, TOS really was as well.
TL;DR How to write a story about building a utopia?
What strikes me is the idea of going very old school and having a set of connected short stories that take place in different time periods with different characters. Possibly starting from the almost obligatory post-apocalpse/post-nuke scenario, because it's easiest to build from scrap rather than from a pre-existing system.
Anyway, anyone have any thoughts on this?
And that brings me to the news today, and Orlando--and Tel Aviv, and ye gods, just, everything, like, seriously, Humanity get your fucking shit together already, godsfuckingdammit!
And somehow that got me to thinking about the idea of a better world, a utopia, and of course Thomas More's Utopia, which is problematic. And there's the saw about how utopias never make good stories, so then I got to thinking about how one COULD make a good story about utopia that wasn't, you know, Star Trek. And of course More's book was also a volume on political philosophy and, I think we could argue about this, TOS really was as well.
TL;DR How to write a story about building a utopia?
What strikes me is the idea of going very old school and having a set of connected short stories that take place in different time periods with different characters. Possibly starting from the almost obligatory post-apocalpse/post-nuke scenario, because it's easiest to build from scrap rather than from a pre-existing system.
Anyway, anyone have any thoughts on this?
