My Dystopian Journey

I didn’t necessarily set out to write dystopian fiction, but I recognised a paradox in what I was seeing. Like Wells’ time traveller, massive corporations and my fellow university students, humans are constantly innovating and creating. Yet much of that innovation aims to make our lives easier and more comfortable, thus reducing the need for future innovation. By pushing this dichotomy to its limits, I could imagine a path by which all scientific and technological progress would ultimately lead humanity to a state in which such progress becomes obsolete. These future humans would have no need for further innovation because all the work had been done for them.

However, when the need for ingenuity, creativity and productivity disappears, these qualities also fall by the wayside. In my mind, the result would be a seemingly utopian society, yet one in which humans lacked an essential element of what makes us human in the first place.

The question then became how humankind could advance step-by-step to this world of obsolete ingenuity. I began to collect articles on emerging developments in space travel and the evolution of race and physical appearance. I scoured the Internet for new discoveries in medicine, fuel and transportation, and extrapolated trends in climate change and population growth.

Through my research and in outlines and a hand-drawn timeline, I then plotted the steps by which humans would make their lives easier. Firstly, cure cancer, AIDS and a host of other terrible diseases. Secondly, eliminate world hunger. Then, slow climate change and explore the farthest reaches of the galaxy. And finally, when a disease-free, well-fed population exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity and fell into war and environmental destruction, find a new planet on which humanity could begin anew, where our accumulated progress could mark the end of malady and strife, but also, the end of progress.

The result for my dystopian story was an automated colony in which machines fulfilled the colonists’ every need and these future humans no longer had to think or care for themselves. All I needed was a trigger to set the story in motion. So I made the machines stop. I made the colonists once again face deprivation and difficulty. I made them relearn how to think for themselves.

And that’s the basic setup for my dystopian novel Our Dried Voices. I took the concept of progress for the sake of comfort and ease and extended that idea to its extreme to create a society in which machines made everything so easy for humans that they no longer needed to be creative or productive. I then worked through the historical steps that would allow such a society to come about. Finally, I imagined a conflict in the breakdown of the machines that would upset the basis of this society and set humans back on the path of thinking for themselves and relying on innovation to solve their problems.