A year of writing sci-fi stories
It is now the end of the year, and it’s a good time to reflect on what went well and what could be improved.
At the start of the year I observed that a lot of science-fiction today was dystopian and pessimistic. Not only did this give readers and viewers a great deal of concern, it also does not reflect the truth on the ground.
The future, particularly our near-future, is certainly unclear. I can’t say with certainty what will happen. But I do believe we can make some general predictions on what the next few decades will look like if we decide to be optimistic and consider what humans can achieve.
I’ll admit I’m not too big a fan of solarpunk. In particular the genre often refers to a world in the future that is recovering from some serious catastrophe.
I recently read Psalm for the Well-Built, which is a good book but has this uncomfortable worldbuilding element. Does the world really need to collapse before things get better? Can’t technology save humanity from disaster?
The world often reflects our culture. A great example of this is Facebook renaming itself to Meta, after the metaverse concept introduced in Snow Crash. If we want to avoid dystopia, our science-fiction needs to present positive role models and positive perspectives. It’s important for no other reason than our mental well-being.
When I first started doing this, I thought one story a month would be a suitable pace. Soon after I changed that to writing two stories a month, one free and one paid.
At the same time, I’ve been saving stories to serve as inspiration for future stories. I’ve created both a Feedly board and used Instapaper. My Instapaper queue has grown increasingly long.
This is to say that I think even two optimistic stories are not enough a month. I may be doing three or more each month, whenever I can find the time. Many of these additional stories will be for paid subscribers only.
I’m creating a new offer for the holiday season, giving you 75% off for the next year. You’ll get access to all these stories, all the previous ones, and join a Discord where you can chat on these topics in more detail.
At the start of the year, I came up with the characters of Emily and Brian. While I had meant them to be recurring characters, later stories ended up covering new ideas with different people.
As I begin to write stories in the new year, I will likely be spending a bit more prep time in formalizing these characters and developing this world of the near-future.
Have a happy new year!