Saturday, July 7, 2012

Backrgound 2029: The World of 2029

It's 2029 and the world is different. In fact, it's been different for a while.


My goal in my 2029 stories is to examine science and the supernatural and, hopefully, in the process, look at life, people, all sorts of things in slightly different ways.


For the universe my stories fall in, history runs according to plan, the same as our history, right up until 1942 and the horrible battle for Stalingrad. An ancient vampyre, one of the oldest of the Undead, purposefully revealed himself in an effort to stop the war. Fighting stopped everywhere as the nations of the world reacted in shock, in amazement...vampyres were real. Lord Ruthven would meet his end, allowing himself to be destroyed during his shuttle diplomacy all across the world. His revealing the existence of vampyres was enough though to stop the fighting. World War II would end in a series of negotiated truces as all countries looked within, concerned about what sort of hidden things (like vampyres) might be in their midst.


One by one, the warring countries stopped and turned their attentions inward. The world as it had been known was forever changed. 


Vampyres revealing themselves came first but in the decades that followed more and more secrets came out. There were humans, perhaps as many as twenty percent of the worldwide population, who had abilities, powers, things they could do that science could not explain. Where there had just been vampyres, there were suddenly also werewolves and creatures that had once been thought of as only mythical, Centaurs, Harpies and Gorgons. Magic was revealed to be real. Ghosts, existed. Science was at a loss to explain all of this but, at the same time, exploded forward in a burst of growth. Cloning came early but robotics, advanced robotics with artificial intelligence capabilities was close behind. The world was exploding both with science and with the supernatural. 


That's the set-up, anyway. I've long been a fan of science fiction (Logan's Run, Gattica, Never Let Me Go) and horror (Underworld, True Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and as I thought about both I thought about how interesting it might be to bring them together, at least, to the degree that one could. I imagined that the revelation of the supernatural world being 'real' might be a boon to science. Even if science couldn't figure out the 'hows' and the 'whys' it might inspire lines of research that didn't exist before. At the very least, knowing that, say, magic was true, could lead to the creation of things that might never have existed otherwise.

Faulkner said, "...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

 It's worth thinking about, I think. It's something I think about when I approach my stories. Whether you're a clone or an android or a vampyre, what is the conflict within yourself? What is it that's driving you? That interests me. That's what I'm interested in pursuing in my stories.

So...in case you were wondering about all this '2029 stuff', that's it. A future of science and the paranormal. Drones and androids, clones and vampyres, ghosts and werewolves. Magic and science. Humans, near humans and the formerly human, along with some who long to be human...all just trying to get through this thing called life.

No comments: