What Happens Next
When Reality May Be Worse Than Fiction
My job as a science fiction writer is to reflect the world around me at the same time as extrapolate from the events of that world into an unknowable future. For weeks, since the release of The Furies’ Bog, I’ve been trying to continue the story, researching, and hoping to add chapters to a first draft I started in the summer. But it’s been difficult. The problem is that I usually write an embellished story with worst case scenarios, confident that this entirely negative view will not become reality. But what happens when reality threatens to become as bad as my worst predictions.
Sigh. What happens is that I find myself unable to write.
So perhaps I have to begin with the story of today. So many people fail to understand the implications of the decisions made in the U.S. recently. They can’t extrapolate. They also refuse to look backward at history, and detect the eerie echoes of a time we thought was long past.
The first page, or perhaps the backstory, of this story begins with pain, job loss, struggle, jealousy, anger. Artificial intelligence—robots—were usurping jobs from the middle class and the struggling poor. Of course, this didn’t affect the wealthy. They could produce goods more efficiently and cost effectively, and they just grew richer and richer. What do you want when you can have everything you want? Well, naturally, you want more power. But I digress.
Let’s get back to the poor. (At one time they were called serfs or slaves.) Some of them started to work two or three part time jobs just to put food on the table, since that was all they could find. They were tired; they were hungry; they were spiritually depressed. Most of all, they were frustrated. This frustration turned to anger, because their life was so grueling and unsatisfactory, and they could see through a multitude of cameras that some people didn’t struggle like they did. The middle class was looking on and seeing their jobs disappear one by one and they were afraid. They didn’t want to become the struggling poor. They were angry too, because some governments asked them to support the poor, and they didn’t want to spend their dwindling cash on other people.
Anger and fear. A potent combination.
One thing about human beings is that no matter how intelligent we supposedly are, how evolved, when we become angry we often revert to our tribal roots. We love to blame others for our problems.
Some of these angry, afraid people turned to religion, pulling out passages from their holy books to justify their anger. The problem with selecting random passages is that you can justify anything with a few words taken out of context. This happens in the Middle East. This happens in middle America. Hmm, are we really so different, after all?
The wealthy, seeing this anger and fear, worried that the blame could be turned against them, since they certainly weren’t inclined to share. So they encouraged the tribal instinct. They wrote blogs and books about globalization, and blamed other nations for what was really a robot invasion. And some sly con men saw this as a way to further their own wealth and power. They would encourage the scapegoating of other people, blame the infiltration of the “other.” It was a tactic that was used quite effectively before, particularly by the most ruthless dictator of the twentieth century.
“Cling to each other, be patriotic, oust the outsider, trust your most base nature, and call it safekeeping. Your fear is correct. The ‘other’—the
immigrants, the establishment (whatever that is), the people who differ from you in their identity such as LBGTQ, women, anyone that offends you with a call to fair treatment, must be subjugated, if not eliminated. Let your anger fill the realms of social media; spit upon others and watch them spit back. When they spit back, you know they are evil.”
The dictator glories in division. It muddies the water. It removes clarity of thought.
The dictator doesn’t care about you, though. He doesn’t care about the poor or the soon-to-be poor middle class. He cares only about himself and his delight in power. He will obfuscate the truth, and little by little, and sometimes in huge steps remove this right and that right, until everyone is cowering under his mighty military foot. He keeps power that way, because he can then change laws that limit his power or time span, and no one will dare oppose him. At this point, he can do whatever he wants—torment his own citizens, arrest journalists, even pillage other nations. Of course, this depends on whether he can convince the military and police force to be absolutely loyal. One thing about power, though. Some people really love it.
What happens next?
The people brave enough will rise up and there will be war.
The nations who’ve had enough will rise up and there will be war. (I don’t want to even think of the billowing mushroom clouds.)
Or we will all become slaves.
These are the worst case scenarios. I deal in them. But are they really so extreme?
The rights are already being retracted, little by little. Nations are already angry and fearful. Women are rising up because they know that they and other marginalized groups will be the first scapegoats. Border guards are abusing their "newfound" power. And across the divide, we hear derision and even more painful, silence . . .
