The news lately has felt pretty apocalyptic.
I won’t get into the international or even national headlines, because there’s far too much there. Instead, I’m going to stick close to my own home, and close to Platformed’s setting.
When I wrote Platformed, I imagined a future embattled by climate change, overpowered corporations, and inept government. It was spring 2019 and I saw hints of all of these on the horizon, but I imagined a fire claiming a major population center in 2035. I imagined tropical diseases overrunning California sometime late in the 2020s. I thought there’d be some new virus spurred by human encroachment on the natural world, but I didn’t picture a pandemic quite like covid-19.
Last week, my partner and I both tested positive for covid. We’re fully vaccinated and basically fine now, but we did panic a little (or at least I did; he’s far too level headed for that). In an obscene privileged-people-problem, the biggest consequence of covid for us has been that we had to cancel our first international vacation in two years. I’ll see you someday, Iceland!
While sitting on my couch with body aches and exhaustion, I’ve had a lot of time to track the news (in retrospect, this is perhaps not healing behavior). And what I’ve read has been dire.
West Nile Virus, a mosquito-borne illness once confined to tropical climes, has made it all the way to Santa Clara County, where I live. The local government is responding by spraying pesticides all over the place to kill the mosquitoes, which is…not great. But at least we’re deep in a drought so there’s hardly any standing water for mosquitoes to use to reproduce!
Meanwhile, we got hit with the worst air quality of the year so far as a fire descended upon the popular tourist destination of South Lake Tahoe. I went there this spring; it felt verdant and well watered and very far away from the parched golden hills of the drought-stricken lowlands. But it turns out the drought has, in fact, afflicted the mountains too, and now an urban area is under evacuation orders. For so long, cities like Tahoe were the places people fled to when their rural towns were threatened by fire. Not in 2021.
To cap it all off, we are in the throes of an extremely costly recall election in which a far-right candidate currently polling at 18% of the electorate has a strong chance of winning the Governorship. In this failed form of participatory democracy, 49.9% of people could vote to keep Gavin Newsom as the Governor of California and a fraction of that could choose a radical replacement. In my fiction, I portrayed the government floundering (which wasn’t hard to do deep in the Trump years), but I didn’t envision it taking quite such an undemocratic form quite so soon quite so near to me.
It all feels way too familiar.
In case you want to escape into a fictional dystopia instead of our real one, Platformed is free today, September 1, on Amazon and discounted for the rest of the week.