Contemplating dystopia in 2020, part 4 — 2021!!
Happy New Year! As I look back on this very strange year, I think of some bad puns (hindsight is 2020, anyone?), but mostly I wonder at how we have, and haven’t, coped.
Books are the ultimate form of escapism. They temporarily immerse us in a different world, where things are better than they really are, or at least different. They replace our problems with someone else’s problems for a little while.
In a year filled with peril every time you step outside, marked by protest and violence and disease, it can seem more tempting than ever to fall into stories of love and fantasy. I know I’ve revisited my fair share of familiar old tales, beautiful things that I know inside and out, the kind of stories that have you laughing every other page.
Unfortunately, perhaps, when I fall into my own imagination unguided by someone else’s writing, this is not the kind of story that emerges. I like dreamy scenes and tense fights, danger lurking near or bursting forth. My mind comes up with challenges for my characters that plunge them into existential crises literal and figurative. At times I wonder if there’s a place for such stories in a time that feels so fragile.
But it occurs to me that I long for fictional danger at times when literal danger is most visceral.
There’s no better time to read The Handmaid’s Tale than when reproductive rights are threatened. While I worry, I can at least think, It’s not quite so bad.
There’s a reason pandemic and zombie movies were streamed at unseen rates as covid spread around the globe. We don’t know what’s coming–let’s watch other people struggle with things that are almost certainly worse.
While I breathed through an N95 mask to protect me from smoke and virus in equal measure, I escaped into stories where people confronted even worse fates.
I want to see people surviving the worst the world can conjure, or succumbing with dignity after brutal fights, or honoring each other when even dignity crumbles. I want to know that even though I’m literally isolated amid this pandemic, I’m not alone amid the course of human history and imagination.
So yes, I’ll write about environmental collapse and disease outbreaks and civilizations crumbling even as I fear those very things in my real life. It’s how people have coped as long as we’ve been people, and probably longer: our capacity to tell stories.
We need them. I need them. I hope you do, too.