I Predicted the Future and Now Have a Useless Canon of Work
“Hey, this reminds me of that thing you wrote!”
Dystopian sci-fi appeals to the exact spot where my right brain and left brain meet, both sides always vying for attention. Fictional characters and scenarios? Meet the cutting edge of science and technology. I dedicated my thesis play, my thesis novel, and my thesis musical at my various institutions of higher learning to this one genre.
Then 2020 happened. And back in March, before millions of people were dead and millions more were irreparably affected by COVID-19, before “two months in lockdown” became “indefinite,” before we found new boiling points to reach every month, I started noticing something that seemed, at that ignorant time, almost comical. See, when you write speculative fiction, you want the scenarios to feel real enough to create a dialogue about the potential fate of our future, but fictional enough for people to actually enjoy this kind of thought experiment. Well, the stuff I predicted as nothing more than a “thought experiment” was starting to… uh … happen. And I knew it wasn’t just me who saw these parallels. More than one friend would quip, “Hey, this reminds me of that thing you wrote.”
Cool. Cool cool cool.
Here’s an example.
One of my favorite plays that I’ve written, “The Dark on Fire,” is about a family who has to stay inside due to the toxic environment, and their isolation slowly drives them insane. Their visitors come in masks, they have to disinfect everything frequently, they even get a meal kit delivered! I wrote this around 2011. It was loosely inspired by the situation over in Cheshire, Ohio. But nowadays, Cheshire, Ohio would not be the first thing to come to mind.
Then there’s my thesis musical, which deals with censorship in books and how sometimes, works should be censored when they can negatively impact young minds.
Or my novel, which is mostly about music in the future, but muses how our world might be changed by an event lightyears away, and how nations could use the destruction of ancient art as a bargaining chip. It seemed pretty safe from 2020… But whoops! What about that line about how wall street fell to hackers?
All these works I mentioned? They rarely made it in front of an audience. My song cycle about the internet, “Hyperlink,” did - but what do you do when someone more famous than you comes out with a song reminiscent of your cornerstone piece? “The Dark on Fire” received a prestigious table read, but I put it in the drawer for a year after a guest artist critiqued it by saying “he knows sci-fi” so clearly I’m not doing it right, and then spent much of our session promoting his one-man show where he dresses up like his mother. It was a jarring experience, and certainly one of the strangest birthdays I’ve had.
After many applications and almost as many rejections, I couldn’t help but wonder, with Cassandra-like exhaustion, why no one wanted to hear what I had to say about our potential future. Was something this close to a possible reality just not what people wanted to hear?
You might also be thinking that my works were oft rejected because they are simply bad. I don’t think so, but you take a look at my hyperlinked scraps and judge for yourself.
Regardless… now what?
During the summer of 2020, there was a lot of talk about how media was going to handle the pandemic. Not just in terms of rules and regulations, but as subject matter. Nowadays, everyone feels desperate to get to a place where we can ignore it. We’ve lived it for over a year. How long before we want to relive it at all?
From what I can gather, “COVID as drama” is not what most people want right now, and it’s not what people will need a year, or two, or three years out from the pandemic. And even though I never sought to include current events from this time in my work, it just happened. It’s bound to if you’re keen on writing a realistic near-future. That’s the risk I took. And it’s the risk I’ll keep taking with this genre - not just because of its nature, but because I like putting myself on the edge of possibility. I just want it to be theoretical. Is that too much to ask?
Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel - not just for me, but all creators who are feeling lost: stories of hope. I’ve desperately needed stories of hope during this time, and I believe others have, too. Not necessarily sports movie-levels of “the little guy winning,” but hope in humanity. Art that is reckless but not cynical. Creations that are reflective but not suffocating. Characters who show me how to overcome enormous disasters.
So maybe I shelve “The Dark on Fire” for a bit. That’s okay. I’ve refocused my lens onto another project of mine, “Captain Moriah’s Map of the World,” a steampunk kids show about three friends who make the most of their new and glorious world. It has its dark moments, sure, but they’re there to enhance the light. And maybe the events of “Captain Moriah’s Map of the World” will happen next year and I’ll have to shelve that project, too. That’s okay. If my work isn’t bringing positivity to people, then I don’t want to share it. But I’m going to focus on hope, laughter, and imperfect people you still want to be around.
It’s what I want from my fiction, because it’s what I desperately want from my reality.
