Friday, November 04, 2011

Hopeful Dystopia?

The novel I'm writing for NaNoWriMo is set in a future independent Scotland which has lost a lot of land to rising sea-levels, is recovering from a long war and is just welcoming thousands of climate change refugees into the country.

This is quite a dystopian view of the future Scotland, but I'm aiming to make the book ultimately hopeful. I really think that we need visions of hope for the future. Whether I can weave those visions successfully into a dystopic scenario, remains to be seen!

I've written a total of 12 353 words as I post this. I'm aiming for at least another 500 before the end of the day.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds intriguing! Best of luck with the writing!

Jim Murdoch said...

I think a lot of the time when people look at the future and realise that it's not going to be a utopia they automatically assume that it's going to be a dystopia. I'm living in the future now and it really isn't that different to the past where I imagined flying cars and tin-foil fashions. The future will be just the future.

nmj said...

Hope it is going well, Juliet - you certainly have embraced the nanowrimo spirit!

I like Jim's quote above, 'The future will be just the future'.

I've been skyping for first few times - with my nephews - and it occurred to me that it really is the stuff of science fiction, my brother was in his office, my nephews at home, and me in my kithcen - and there we all were, chatting and seeing each other. But to my nephews it is just normal life. We could only have dreamt of such things when we were six and ten!

Crafty Green Poet said...

Hi Jim, the future is just the future indeed and that's a great philosophy in many ways. However, writing futures that are different (whether or not they're actually dystopic) offers away to think about issues and address concerns, as well as making for interesting art.

nmj - you're so right, Skype would have been pure SF back in the day....

HKatz said...

The concept is interesting; I wish you luck writing and developing it.