Dystopian Fiction

I mentioned before my previous writing project falling by the wayside. It was a screenplay, targeting an abstracted big box internet retailer who has its tentacles in virtually everything and who treats their employees like absolute shit. Really abstracted! The ending was going to be a disappointing loss but with the potential for greater gain down the road and a main character with a new sense of optimism about her future and the possibility for change.

And that's where the problem is! In the increasingly Doomer vibe of 2021, that kind of optimism and possibility for change feels pretty childish. So that's been shelved, and I've moved on to a format I've never experimented with before, the novel, and a genre that's always fascinated me, dystopian fiction.

Like practically all dystopian works, the idea is to comment upon current times with the abstraction of the future or with another planet, shit like that. But the idea in this case is not to feature a dystopia of a brutal, fascistic regime with noble heroes fighting against a world-conquering power. No, this is one in which the people don't realize they're in a dystopia because they've been conditioned for all of their lives to imagine no alternative and that really they're better off this way. 

Like I said, abstracted!

Now the trick as I see it is to find a level of abstraction that on the one pole is believable and on the other pole is more than just what we're living with now, in our late-stage capitalist hellscape. Not an easy trick. 

The other issue I foresee is that this isn't exactly reinventing the wheel type shit here. There are elements here of numerous other dystopian works, just with more of an anti-capitalist bent. Will it work? Hard to say, but I imagine I'll find out pretty quickly if it does. Right now I'm at the very start, with the only words on paper so far being notes on characters, some aggregation of all of the insidious methods of capitalist control, and some thoughts on how the society reached this point. The latter has proven fun in a 2021 Doomer kind of way, imagining what the next 30 or so years look like. Fun and extremely disheartening obviously, because summer 2021, with its multiple once-in-a-century heat waves, political assassinations, Nazis running wild, all while a pandemic rages largely out of control in most areas, is really just the start. Shit's about to get bad. And the best way I can think of to process that is to put it in words. 

Masks Off

There's a David Frum article going around about how pissed off the vaccinated are. Now I better not see anyone with ostensibly good politics sharing that warmongering little Nazi's shit. But he does have a good point (though he's using it as he uses all of his Trump-era "good points," to ingratiate himself with the Democrats and move them even further to the right while his actual party goes full fascist, but I digress).

I am done wearing masks, and I'm entirely done because I don't value the lives of people who refuse to be vaccinated. This pandemic at this point is entirely theirs, and I hope they choke on it, literally gasping in a hospital, their modified death bed confession a belated plea for a vaccine. 

The most frustrating thing about the situation is that those who are expected to still mask up and be careful are the ones who are already vaccinated and have taken this seriously all along. Because 40% of the country absolutely sucks, we're supposed to maintain an idiotic illusion that doesn't actually protect us (because we virtually can't die from it) and is unnecessary (because the vaccinated are far less likely to spread the virus). It's security theater.

But what about the children?! I've seen people whose opinions I actually trust wail to the heavens about a coming DISASTER if children are allowed to go back to regular school. Let's all settle the fuck down and look at science. First off, teachers must absolutely be vaccinated, and if they're not, they're fired. That's simple, and local governments are well within their rights to do that. We require children to be vaccinated to go to school, the teachers should be, too. Don't like it? Tough. Homeschool your little genetic mistake. A recent study has confirmed how vanishingly small the risks are to children, this study out of England, a country which basically made all of the same mistakes America did. I mean infinitesimally small. Continue to socially distance classrooms, remote learning when necessary, better ventilation, and, sure, wear masks. But screeching about a coming disaster indicates an unwillingness to properly analyze risk, something harkening back to when we used to cross the street to avoid passing someone. True ignorance.

These people howling about disasters are the same ones saying reopening stores in the US was a disaster (it wasn't) and that the CDC removing mask guidance was a disaster (it wasn't). Yes, infection numbers are up, stemming largely from breakthrough cases which are either asymptomatic or akin to a mild cold.

If you were paying attention during the vaccine rollout, the idea was never to prevent people from getting sick. It was to prevent people from dying and to allow us to go back to living. And that's what I'm doing.

That 2021 Vibe

 It's such a bizarre time in American politics, with two competing lines radiating out from this moment.

The first I'll artfully call the "we're all fucked" line. Because let's face it, we kind of are. This is the first summer I can remember when the climate crisis was so brutally obvious. It's not coming; we're flat-out in it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell something. We've got fascists running wild in the streets, Republicans are actively rigging all future elections, and because of how bad the Democrats are, elections really don't much matter anyway. Biden is the mOsT pRoGrEsSiVe PrEsIdEnT of my lifetime, and means less than shit.

But the COVID crisis has exposed another radiation. Let's call this the "we may not actually be fucked" line. Workers are realizing how badly they've been screwed, and they're fighting back the only way capital will understand, by refusing to give away their labor anymore. That is super promising! We've seen beautiful acts of mutual aid in the darkest days of the pandemic and as we emerge from it in a world that has changed but not enough. 

I've been vacillating between these two poles, though to be fair I've hewed much more closely to the former, especially of late, as we careen to yet more unimaginable and self-inflicted catastrophes. That kind of thinking has spurred an increase in writing, both this kind of free-form brain dumping as well as more expansive fiction. My last project, a screenplay, was a little too on the nose and a little too optimistic for my current outlook. I got close to the end of the first act, which involves a moment of workplace violence that I needed to be particularly careful in writing, as the idea was not necessarily to condemn it (it's not a comedy lol). Perhaps I'll pick it up again, but I think the steam I've lost may not be recoverable. I've also become too immersed in media consumption, in constantly refreshing my feeds, and I can't count the number of times I've closed Twitter and immediately re-opened it forgetting I'd just closed it. That shit's not healthy.

OK, just tweeted a few times. Now where was I?

First Post

I'm gonna be doing some writing here. 

I promise this a lot, and I start these things from time to time. I start new shit, I lose interest, and then I pick it up again. 

Fresh starts can be fun.

See you around these parts, maybe.