The Blade Runner movie trailer, from 1982, featuring a very young Harrison Ford. The futuristic movie, released two years before the first Apple Macinstosh computer came out, was Ridley Scott's vision of the future. The movie was set in Los Angeles in November 2019, as you can see in the slate at the very beginning.
In October of 2019, I woke up one morning with a writing idea. I had a whole bunch of somewhat interconnected ideas bouncing around my head, about where society was heading. As an amateur futurist and economics geek, I had been watching a bunch of different trends playing out in society, some for nearly 30 years. They all seemed to be converging, coming together. That made me think that the new decade we were heading into, the 2020's, was going to be one of the craziest decades in a really, really long time.
The idea I woke up with that October morning was that I should go through 20 or 30 of the dystopian future movie trailers from the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's. I would look at how those writers and directors envisioned the future of human society, and compare it with what society then, in late 2019, was really like. What did the writers and directors of 30-40-50 years ago get right? What did they get wrong? That was my starting point.
So I did that, the best I could, since Life had decided to kick my ass for the first couple of decades of the 21st century, and I was homeless. I woke up with that big idea, while sleeping in a restaurant parking lot in the San Fernando Valley, right over the hill from Hollywood. I had a laptop, so I started going through those trailers for futuristic movies and watching them, starting with Metropolis from 1927, and ending with The Hunger Games and Alita: Battle Angel, from 2019. What surprised me most was that those really intelligent writers and directors got the future mostly wrong. I also learned that Blade Runner was set in the time and place that I was writing this idea. That was a really synchronistic. In November 2019, the biggest problem wasn't rogue replicants killing people, like in Blade Runner, it was homelessness, according to an L.A. Times poll that month. Big difference. And no flying cars, either.
Being really broke, I bought a paper notebook, and began writing my rough ideas out in late October 2019, and I kept that up, as they started to come together, through November and December of 2019. As all those jumbled up ideas of our future began to gel in my head, I wasn't sure what to do with them. A book? Self-published or try to get it published by a real publisher? Maybe a screenplay? I was in the middle of the "real" Hollywood (Burbank, Studio City, North Hollywood), where most movies actually get made. There was a need to hurry building in me. Something that in my intuition told me to just get these ideas out where people can read them, as soon as possible. There was an urgency to the project. So on December 21st, 2019, I built a blog, called "Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now- Book 1." At the time, it was beginning to seem like this big idea could be a series, leading to a "book 2" later on.
I built the blog, with placeholder photos in each chapter, so it would be in order when people went to read it. If I just wrote it as a blog, the chapters would be in backwards order. That's why I pre-built the whole blog, so I could write each chapter later, and then delete any unneeded chapters, and have them in order. I thought I might have 10 or 11 ideas for chapters at the time. But I built the blog with 20 chapters, figuring I would probably come up with a couple of new ideas as I was writing. I began writing chapter 1 at the end of December 2019, and just kept going, putting out a chapter or two each week. More ideas did pop up, and I filled up all 20.
As I was writing "Dystopia," Covid-19 came into the picture as "something happening over in China." Then it hit U.S. shores when I was about halfway through Dystopia. Then we were told it was no big deal by the White House. Then it became apparent that it was a big deal, and the stock market crashed, lockdowns happened, and 2020 became the craziest year most people could remember. Until 2021 came along, anyhow.
This whole series of ideas, more of a series of essays than a coherent book, make a lot more sense now. My nickname for this decade, "The Tumultuous 2020's," makes more sense now as well. I still think these underlying themes in "Dystopia" are playing out, fueling the surface chaos we all have to deal with, like inflation and a another recession (depression?), at the moment.
While my "book/blog thing" is by no means a hit, it's pulled in over 2,600 page views, over the 20 chapters, in 2 1/2 years. For as intense of reading as it is, that's not bad. Since so much of my underlying thinking is in "Dystopia," which feeds many of the posts in this blog, I figured it was time to link it here, so anyone interested can go check it out. Each chapter is fairly self-contained, and can be read alone. This post is just a sign post, to let people know this big chunk of my thinking and writing, from the beginning of 2020, is out there, for any who might be interested. Click the link above to take a look.
No comments:
Post a Comment