Yes, long ago, I dreamt of being a novelist. Two ancient manuscripts packed away in a distant corner of my closet attest to that (ir)reality, as does one novel focused on the world of publishing (in which I’d been an editor) that made it into print, even if it was barely noticed. Still, from time to time, I’ve thought about trying to write fiction again.
These days, however, when I consider that possibility, I find myself smiling, however grimly. After all, how could you truly write fiction in a world — and I’m not just thinking of Donald Trump (though I most distinctly am thinking of him) — that seems ever more fictionalized? How could you write fiction in a country whose former president and presidential candidate used the word “I” 317 times in a single speech or, in another, spun a tale of near death in an almost-helicopter crash in which nothing he mentioned actually happened? He even — all too conveniently — put the wrong “Brown” (Kamala Harris’s pal Willie Brown instead of California governor Jerry Brown) in the copter that didn’t come close to going down with him on board. Oh, wait, maybe there actually was a helicopter with him and another cast of characters entirely that did at least come closer to going down! And just in case you hadn’t noticed, he’s already claiming, in a strikingly repetitive fashion, that Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential campaign and Kamala Harris’s nomination together represent nothing short of a “coup” in the Democratic Party: “This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow… They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”
And if that doesn’t tell you something about the state of the country whose leaders, when the Soviet Union disappeared in 1992, hailed the U.S. as the world’s “lone superpower” and acted accordingly, what does? Honestly (speaking of fiction), if I were now able to time-travel back to that moment and tell those leaders that, less than a quarter-century later, this country would elect a president whose only public accomplishment before entering the Oval Office was to host and be the leading character (and I do mean character!) on a TV show called The Apprentice, who would have believed me? If I could now tell them that, having been in the Oval Office once, and making so many of the rest of us his apprentices for four years, he couldn’t stop trying to return, neither they, nor anyone else then alive (including, I suspect, Donald Trump), would have thought it possible. In fact, such a description of American politics would have been off the charts, even for, say, dystopian fiction.
A distinctly-topian world
And speaking of -topias, my more-or-less namesake (since my first name is Thomas and my middle name Moore), Sir Thomas More, produced the first Utopia, inventing that very word as the title for his 1516 novel about a fictional island in the then-barely-known or even imagined New World. And almost half a millennium later, while an editor at Pantheon Books I would put out — or more accurately, stumble upon and reintroduce to our strange world — Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 utopian masterpiece Herland. Still, if either More or Gilman were alive today, I doubt they would be writing utopian anythings. Even the word “dystopian” might no longer seem strong enough for this grim world of ours. Perhaps what we need for 2024 and beyond, on a planet going down big time (even if in slow motion), is an altogether new word — something like “catastropian”? — that would be H.G. Wells or George Orwell multiplied by 10 (or maybe I mean 100) and not faintly in the same universe with More or Gilman.
Our world is now, in fact, mega-dystopian in so many ways it’s almost hard to fathom and I’m not just thinking of the nearly 50,000 people believed to have died in Europe alone last year from the megafires, droughts, and devastating heat waves of climate change. Nor am I thinking of the more than 40,000 Palestinians (and still counting) slaughtered in Gaza over the last 10 (yes, 10!) months in a war that never seems to end on — again, if this were fiction you wouldn’t believe it — a strip of land only 25 miles long and 4 to 7 miles wide. And worse yet, it’s painfully clear that, instead of facing our catastrophian future of ever more disastrous planetary overheating, humanity continues to find itself distracted in a distinctly metatopian fashion by all too many other nightmares that show not the slightest sign of ending. (And if, in this paragraph, I made up a word or two to fit this new world of ours, I hope you’ll forgive me.)
Admittedly, the one thing we’re missing to fully transform an already thoroughly dystopian planet (other than the arrival of devastatingly hostile extraterrestrials in UFOs) is an actual world war. Still, three major conflicts continue to roll (rattle or roil?) on this planet of ours, one in Ukraine (and now Russia, too), one in Gaza (that’s increasingly threatening to spread across the Middle East), and one in Sudan, all of them murderous and none of them showing the slightest sign of going away — more or less ever. Each of them accounts for staggering numbers of humans being slaughtered or disappearing in who knows what horrific ways, even as such wars pour yet more devastating greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, helping ensure that this planet continues to become too hot to handle. (And mind you, the U.S. military alone emits more hydrocarbons than whole countries like Portugal or Denmark!)
I mean, tell me all of that doesn’t add up to a truly big-time, if slow-rolling, version of dystopia or possibly worse. In fact, if, once upon a time, you had been able to put all of this into a dystopian novel, I guarantee you that no one would have found it faintly credible (even as an imagined future). Consider, for instance, a significant power in the Middle East (backed financially and militarily, weapon by endless weapon, by the once mightiest nation on Planet Earth) fighting an unending war with almost any imaginable kind of weaponry short of an atomic bomb against a modest-sized guerrilla force on a tiny strip of land holding a population of about 2.1 million people, essentially destroying more or less everything in sight and still not winning. (Put that in a novel and you’d be laughed out of the dystopian living room!)
And that’s just to start describing the grim fantasy world of present-day reality where, more than 500 years later, even the faintest sense of utopia is all too literally missing in action.
Hey, and while you’re at it, imagine Russia’s leader on a planet where the Cold War is ancient history, deciding to invade Ukraine and fight a never-ending, wildly destructive conflict there, year after endless year, while my country (as if it were indeed still in a Cold War world) backed the Ukrainians to the tune of something like $117 billion (yes, billion!), much of it in the form of advanced weaponry, while no one seems even faintly interested in launching negotiations for peace of any sort. (Whew! That was a long sentence!)
A mad, mad planet
In the context of all this, consider Donald Trump’s latest run for the presidency a sign sent from… well, I won’t even try to guess where… that this country, which its leaders not so long ago considered the only power of significance (and then at least the greatest power) on Planet Earth, is going down, down, down all too fast, fast, fast. Now, don’t misconstrue me on this. The U.S. still “invests” more in its military than the next nine countries combined and well over a trillion dollars annually in what it calls “national defense.” And given that, isn’t it strange how few Americans consider it, yes, strange that this country hasn’t won a war of significance since World War II? And that may, in fact, be one reason it’s visibly heading for hell in a handbasket, even if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do pull out this election.
Of course, if they do, given Donald Trump and the increasingly mega-dystopian nature of the United States, don’t be surprised to see it begin, in its own fashion, to come apart at the [you fill this one in] ___-topian seams. After all, an estimated one of every 20 Americans now owns at least a single AR-15 rifle (which is about as close as you can get to a machine gun without actually having one) and, no surprise here, mass shootings in this country in recent years averaged more than 600 annually.
Now, assuming Donald Trump doesn’t, in fact, win election 2024, just for a moment try to imagine this country next November. It’s a given, of course, that, should he lose, Trump and his crew will denounce that loss as fraudulent and dispute it big time. (He’s already saying the 2024 election will be “rigged” against him.) With that in mind, imagine the “lone superpower” of Planet Earth a mere three decades ago as it now begins to come apart at the seams. And mind you, were he to win the election, assume that he would be almost guaranteed to use the Insurrection Act to dispatch the American military to the streets of Washington, D.C., and other “Democratic” cities to suppress anyone demonstrating against his victory and the Trumptopia to come.
Were Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to win and not be instantly challenged by a country coming apart at the seams, their administration would undoubtedly continue supporting the wars in Gaza and Ukraine (and largely ignoring the one in Sudan). In her convention acceptance speech, in fact, Harris plugged the sort of militarized foreign policy that’s been ours forever and a day. (“I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.”) Still, she and Walz wouldn’t be set on quite literally heating the planet to the boiling point in the fashion of Donald Trump and his Big Oil buddies. (Though mind you, even without Trump, my country has set absolute global records in recent years for producing oil and exporting natural gas.)
And I haven’t even mentioned that only recently California, ablaze, had its hottest month in recorded history or that the good news on Planet Earth was that, unlike the previous 13 months, July may not — no, not! — have set a new monthly global record for heat, but merely come in a remarkably close second to the worst July (of 2023) in human history. Mind you, the last 10 Julys have been the 10 hottest ever and climate change was barely mentioned at the Democratic convention, while the Trumpublicans continued to attack Harris and other Democrats for their “war on American energy.”
How you-topian can we get?
Fiction? You must be kidding. Don’t even think about creating imaginary worlds on a planet where reality is becoming the biggest fiction of all and our mega-, catastrophic-, dys-, miss-, piss-topian moment could leave anything the human mind might conjure up all too literally in the dust of history.
So, yes, put that novel you’re writing in a drawer. Ours is now a world that indeed does increasingly threaten to leave fiction in the dust and give dystopian a whole new meaning. In short, you and I are living in a reality that looks ever more sadly fictional.
And it’s up to each of us to — think of this, five centuries later, as Thomas More updated, perhaps even as you-topian — do what we can to bring this planet of ours under some kind of control for, if not us, then our poor children and grandchildren.
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