Living the Reality of my Heroine's (Once) Fictional Time

The past week has been downright unsettling. Not just because of social distancing, virtual lockdown, and an economy teetering on meltdown, but because I suddenly realized I'd experienced this scenario before.

But it was all in my head.

I'm now living in my heroine's time--in Lissa Bruce's era--and it's a bit freaky how her fictional world is becoming our reality. Life imitating art? Considering this book isn't published yet....nope. Just one writer's eerie projection of a future that is looking much too possible.

I say "the future" because at the time I wrote the original drafts, it truly was.

I'm really not supposed to admit this, but The Outer Planets has been in the hopper for over 30 years. When the story originally began to take shape in my mind, the 2040s seemed like a very long way off. Not so anymore.

The novel is currently in edits, but now, with everything going on around us, I'm not sure just when I may be ready--or willing--to release it.

Here's the lowdown.

When I started writing this novel, my heroine's totally sci-fi sounding birth date was the far distant year of 2012. A future that is in our past! So yeah, this year she'd be turning eight years old on 9/9/2020. Her parents are wealthy. In fact, her father is a politician. She still carries deep guilt about all the things she had as a child while her friends and their families were starving.

The story opens when Lissa Bruce is 27 years old. In the year 2039, the next couple of decades in our future are her past tense. The world is experiencing a new dawn, emerging from borderline dystopia, where a global economic collapse and continuing climate change resulted in a scramble to survive.

When did it happen? In the 2020's! That's looking a little less Fi and a lot more Sci at the moment.

[Honestly, I'm not making this stuff up! Do a search for "Outer Planets" on this site and you'll see my blogs about it that date back many years.]

In this fictional future, the melting ice sheets decreased the salt content of the oceans and partially altered the currents of the Atlantic Conveyor, throwing weather patterns into chaos. While the oceans rose, drowning coastline cities worldwide, drought turned former breadbasket regions into dust bowls. The effects on Lissa's society are dire.

Water riots became commonplace. Mobs formed to loot stores—not to steal goods and electronics to resell on the street--but to take the food they need for themselves and their families to survive.

In rural areas, communities formed raid gangs that stripped crops clean and butchered livestock on neighboring farms. [Particularly unnerving, since this is happening right now in other parts of the world--with gruesome recent news reports coming out of South America and Libya.]

Moral principles took a back seat to survival. Outbreaks of disease and anarchy prevailed. The United Nations disbanded as ineffective and costly, and governments refocused these resources on maintaining order inside their own borders and protecting their citizens. Police states and martial law became commonplace.

It's a frightening scenario considering where we are at this moment in time, but even this grim fictional setting is not a future without hope.

By 2030, the climate begins to stabilize, thanks to an enforced planet-wide scale back in greenhouse gas emissions, and the world returns to more normal conditions, socially and economically, leaving mankind still shaking in its boots at what could have been.

And what might be again in their not too distant future.

It's painfully clear to them that the human population has far exceeded the resources of their home planet...and after a worldwide population reduction during the cataclysms, is again growing exponentially.

The Nations is formed, a multi-national entity with a focus on expanding and diversifying our species' interests beyond the “all the eggs in one basket” scenario of having the fate of the humankind tied to one planet.

International resources are pooled to re-ignite a global space exploration program. As part of that plan, ASP—Armstrong Space Port—with its orbiting shipyards, begins construction in orbit in 2030 and is completed by the close of 2035. A year later it houses a population of over 15,500 international military, corporate and support personnel, and the ability to build large ships that are no longer limited by the problem presented by gravity and massive fuel tanks required to overcome it.

With regular shuttle flights from ASP, temporary bases are constructed on the Moon and Mars as the first step in establishing permanent mining operations. It doesn't happen without tragedy. The characters refer to one such catastrophe on Mars Station One more than once in the story.

Once ASP is online, Project Destination follows. Spearheaded by The Nations, it’s an ambitious multi-national exploratory mission to the Outer Planets—Jupiter and Saturn, and more specifically the 100+ moons they share between them—to identify resources, future colony sites, and launching points for interstellar missions to other solar systems.

Construction of the Nations’ Star Ship—NSS Destination—starts. And the debate about crew selection begins...

Whew! Let's hope most of the fictional scenario of this "here, now and about to be" stays just that. Fictional.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and stay positive!