remotefiction

Interesting Times

Inspiration is all around. Sometimes you need to pay attention. But, as the saying goes, we live in interesting times, and all you need to do is look around, listen to the news. Of course, in some ways, as others before me have pointed out, we live in times which are a little too interesting. In that by the time you’ve finished writing something, it’s all been undermined by current events.

William Gibson has said of his Sprawl trilogy that he had this fractured broken America while the Soviet Union kept going strong, because at the time he wrote those books that is what seemed likely to him. While Philip K Dick’s novels seem much more out there, especially from today’s perspective, there is a definite frisson of the bizarre to be reading a novel written in the past set in the year that you are reading it. However in times like these things move faster than you can write about them, so you don’t have the luxury of decades to sit and watch your work being wrong. The bigger question becomes – can you get it out there before the most random country you could pick transforms to undermine your work.

Which is something Charles Stross has written about a number of times in the last couple of years, as he bangs his head against that particular wall. And more recently Walter John Williams new novel Deep State, which seems to deal with the plot of a Social Revolution, nearly got scrapped during events in Iran, only to be reworked and appear the week that Egypt took some degree of parallel course to his work. But then sometimes you just need to shrug and get on with it, there are gambits to get round these things – the old fall back of imaginary country in Africa/Middle East/Asia delete as applicable.

Regardless, to me, there is certainly enough going on now to spark ideas, which can be recontextualised as one sees fit into something of fantastic or horrific proportions.