Writing Dystopian Fiction: A Good Way to Handle a Mad, Mad World

Photo by Dean Maddocks on Unsplash

It’s hard to write dystopian fiction these days.

Not because it’s hard to imagine crazy, whacked-out scenarios for the End Times (and everything after). The problem is, given the length of time it takes to write a book, reality can catch up to your vision — and force you to make some hard decisions. Do you re-write what you’ve done, trying to make things even crazier? Or do you leave things how they are, and embrace how closely your fictional narrative is bending to the real life happening outside your window?

It took me three years (off and on) to write Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, which mashes together elements of rural noir and dystopian thriller. When I began, in ye olden days of 2014, I was worried at moments that I was going too far; by the time I was putting on some finishing touches at the very beginning of 2019, I was worried I hadn’t quite gone far enough.

I suspect there are other writers facing a similar conundrum. William Gibson, for example, has always been seen as a literary diviner of sorts; his 2014 novel, The Peripheral, features not one but two future timelines. At its core, there’s the idea that political chaos and climate change will lead to the slow degradation of civilization in the mid-21st century — an apocalypse so slow that hardly anyone notices until it’s too…