More Random Thoughts, This Time on Fiction and Utopia

[caitri]

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?

Comments

[sail-aweigh.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about fic, I haven't written anything significant in nearly 2 years; a couple of shorter fics (comment fic mostly) and that's it. I've lost my mojo.

Utopia fic, huh. I think your idea works very well, in the style of Ray Bradbury. So many of his books were interconnected short stories and they've become scifi classics. I say go for it! We never saw the world building in Star Trek, but I think that would be a fascinating subject to use as a model. How did they recover from something like the Eugenics War? What was the first step? It couldn't have happened all at once. I think it can be done.

[caitri.livejournal.com]

I'm still thinking on it, but thanks for the encouragement, bb!!!! <3