I got an idea today for a post-pandemic sci-fi story that’s joyful, and it’s one of the things keeping me going right now: a vision of a better future.

I’ve written some of it at home today, where I usually write. So, not much change for me there. If there’s anything good I can take out of these Covid-19 “stay at home” times, it’s that, with any luck, I’ll be more productive with my writing having to be home more right now. If I can stay off the Internet long enough that is…(a usual battle for those who work at home, and yes I spelled Internet with a capital “I” despite what some recent word-trends would have you do; after all, the Internet is the name for a thing: the world network of computers that is public (used to be just the WWW prefix of the World Wide Web, but has grown). That’s a proper noun. /Grammar rant mode off.  If you think I’m wrong you can get off my lawn 😉

Funny how that works, that staying home and productivity ratio! Writers (and I think this is true for most who work from home) generally get more done during the cold months than the warm months. Too many things to do outside when the weather is nice, pulling away our time and attention, it seems. Then the cooler weather eventually sets in and thoughts go back to word counts rather than vacations,  warm summer nights, and days that never seem to end.

Writing about a possible future can be an important part in creating it. We’ve seen this happen again and again, but unfortunately those futures were mostly dystopias. As much as I have enjoyed such stories and movies that were very artfully done, I hoped such worlds would not come to be, and yet they largely have; I always wondered why there were not more possible futures I’d like to live in. What we choose to write is up to us, but I think it’s time we write about more uplifting possible futures than the current state of the world we are now in. Maybe then we will find we are living in a better world one day.

See my previous entry about The Prescience of Science Fiction Authors for more on this topic, and where writers get their ideas to write about the future.