[ExI] far future

[Kelly Anderson]

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 12:40 PM, William Flynn Wallace
<foozler83 at gmail.com>wrote:

> I've thought of that.  The future people are all cheerful, tolerant and so
> on.  It might be that we would get tired of all that good humor.
>
> Also, can there be good without evil?  What would they gossip about?  What
> would they regard as funny?  Intricate puns?  The Three Stooges?
>

The first rule of fiction is that the book has to be interesting enough so
that the reader is engaged and doesn't want to set the book down.
Otherwise, nobody reads it to the end, and what's the point of that?

Funny thing about humans. The things we find "interesting" in fiction are
the sorts of things we would most like to avoid in our own lives. Murder,
rape, societal devolution, violence, cheating (both kinds) and that sort of
thing.

A book about a Utopia is therefore very difficult to make interesting. I'm
not saying that it hasn't been done, or that it can't be done, but it is
very much harder to do.

Ayn Rand wrote of her Utopia in "Atlas Shrugged" arising out of a dystopian
future that was and remains all too familiar. Similarly, there was a Utopia
in Elysium, but it was simply a foil. Oblivion features a similar Utopia.
Of course the one that started it all was Plato's Republic, which few of us
would think of as anything but dystopian by today's standards.

It is the striving for Utopia against the realities of limited resources
that creates the interesting tension necessary to pull off a good novel. In
the novel I am writing, there is a kind of dystopian utopia fighting
against a very real dystopian present. It provides all the tension required
to make it endlessly interesting.

So, what is the serpent in your garden?

-Kelly
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