And it’s just as well, because truth be told, I’m not very good at writing dystopias. For one thing, my worlds embody an almost Pollyannaesque view of human nature.
Consider: We live in a world where planet-spanning financial institutions screen job applicants for symptoms of sociopathy—not to weed out the sociopaths, but to recruit them. Even after those institutions ran the global economy off a cliff—knowingly, as it turns out—the bodies ostensibly set up to regulate them have stated explicitly that no matter what laws were broken, no matter what damage was done, nobody’s going to jail. In terms of despots running the asylum, you can’t get much more explicit than that—and these are the good guys, the leaders of the so-called “free world.”
But you won’t find any Goldman Sachses in my work. No Dick Cheneys or Osama bin Ladens either. Nobody starts wars under false pretences to enrich their buddies in the oil industry; nobody justifies mass murder by invoking the divine. The pope rates a brief mention near the end of the Rifters trilogy, but only to establish that he’s fled into exile, reviled and hunted for his corporation’s traditional abuse of the helpless; another instance of sunny naivety in my world-building, perhaps.
Bad things do happen in Wattsworld, of course, but generally to avert worse ones. Jasmine Fitzgerald guts her husband like a fish, but only to save his life. The nameless narrator of “Repeating the Past” deliberately induces PTSD in his grandson, but only to save his soul. Patricia Rowan (from the Rifters books again) may authorize the destruction of the Pacific Northwest and enough human collateral to put the Iraq war to shame, but she’s not doing it to pad her bank account; she’s trying to save the goddamn world. Any of the half-dozen people who read βehemoth—alert for classic cardboard villainy—might point to the unleashed sexual sadism of Achilles Desjardins, but even he wasn’t to blame for what he did. He was a profoundly moral individual whose conscience was neurochemically excised by someone who (again, with the best of intentions) only wanted to set him free.
I can’t write real villains. I tried, once. I based one of Starfish’s characters on someone I knew in real life. No one too extreme of course, no rapist or murderer: just a slimy little opportunist who made a career out of taking credit for other people’s work and customizing his scientific opinions to suit the highest bidder. But I wasn’t up to capturing even that penny-ante level of perfidy; writing the character as I saw him, he came across as a mustache-twirling cutout. The only way I could sell him to myself was to give the character more depth, make him more sympathetic, than his inspiration was in real life.
I can’t do fundamentalists very well either. I try to describe a biblical creationist and end up with a condescending cartoon scribbled by a smug elitist. So characters who do survive to publication all come across as products of some parallel timeline where even the garbage collectors have BScs. Lenie Clarke may be a glorified pipe-fitter, but she’d never deny the existence of climate change. Kim and Andrew Goravec are pretty crappy parents, but not so crappy that you’d ever catch them at an anti-vaccine rally. Even Jess’s nameless widowed dad—hunkered down against vast forces he can only dimly comprehend—regards sex in curiously erudite terms: “just another pair of mammals, trying to maximize our fitness before the other shoe dropped.”
And yet, the world is in the mess it’s in largely because real people do deny climate change and evolution, because 85 percent of the North American population believes in an invisible sky fairy who sends you to Space Disneyland after you die, so who gives a shit about the eastern beach tiger beetle? Here in reality those folks make up the majority; they’re nowhere to be found in Wattsworld.[3] You could argue that I don’t write about real people at all. For all their personal demons, for all the squalor of their surroundings, my characters are more like some kind of human Platonic ideals.
You could also argue that, having spent most of my adult life hanging out with scientists and academics, my range is just too limited to craft any other kind of character. Fair enough.
I’m not claiming that I don’t tell my stories against a dystopian backdrop. Take the Rifters trilogy, for example. The desperate rearguard against ongoing environmental collapse, the neurochemically enslaved bureaucrats deciding which part of the world they’ll incinerate today to hold back the latest plague, the exploitation of abuse victims to run power plants on the deep-ocean floor—none of this is the stuff of Hallmark Theatre. But in a very real sense, these are not my inventions; they are essential features of any plausible vision of the future. The thing that distinguishes science fiction, after all—what sets it apart from magic realism and horror and the rest of speculative horde—is that it is fiction based on science. It has to be at least semiplausible in its extrapolations from here to there.
Where can we go, from here? Where can we go, starting with seven billion hominids who can’t control their appetites, who wipe out thirty species a day with the weight of their bootprints, who are too busy rejecting evolution and building killer drones to notice that the icecaps are melting? How do you write a plausible near-future in which we somehow stopped the flooding and the water wars, in which we didn’t wipe out entire ecosystems and turn millions into environmental refugees?
You can’t. That ship—that massive, lumbering, world-sized ship— has already sailed, and it turns so very slowly. The only way you can head off those consequences by 2050 is by telling a tale in which we got serious about climate change back in the nineteen-seventies—and then you’re not talking science fiction any more, you’re talking fantasy.
So if my writing tends toward the dystopic it’s not because I’m in love with dystopias; it’s because reality has forced dystopia upon me. A ravaged environment is no longer optional when writing about the near future. All I can do now is imagine how my characters might react to the hand they’ve been dealt. The fact that they resort to implanting false memories and neurological shackles in their employees, that they may order the immolation of ten thousand innocent refugees—that’s not what makes dystopia. What makes dystopia is an inheritance in which these awful actions are the best ones available, where every other alternative is even worse; a world where people commit mass murder not because they are sadists or sociopaths, but because they are trying to do the least harm. It is not a world my characters built. It is only the world we left them.
There are no real villains in Wattsworld. If you want villains, you know where to look.
Dystopia is not always an unhappy place. There are, as it happens, certain dystopias in which it’s perfectly possible to be happy as a clam. Vast numbers of people go through life never even realizing that they’re in one, might live through the real-time decay from freedom to tyranny and never notice the change.
It basically comes down to wanderlust.
Imagine your life as a path extending through time and society. To either side are fences festooned with signs: No Trespassing, Keep Off the Grass, Thou Shalt Not Kill. These are the constraints on your behavior, the legal limits of acceptable conduct. You are free to wander anywhere between these barriers—but cross one and you risk the weight of the law.
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2 Actually, that’s not quite true; my next novel centers around the existence of an omnipotent, miracle-performing god, and the very smart folks who study it. But I can assure you that the god of