I watched a (long) video last night that basically reviewed 50 years of dystopian movies and said we were stuck in a doom loop that was killing the future.
Exactly so, my friend.
Even better, they reviewed Tomorrowland, where the whole premise is “scaring” people about a horrible future in an attempt to “wake them up” to the problem and get them to change, but instead it had the exact opposite effect, bumming everyone out, creating a doom loop which guaranteed the apocalypse.
Which brings me to Extrapolations, the new near-future cli-fi TV series I was *so* looking forward to, which turned out to be (in the words of my friend David) Black Mirror: The Climate Edition.
Maybe that’s the only kind of show people are willing to make… I hope that’s not true. Because that’s not the story we need, and I plan to write the TV pilot I think we need next month.
Which is a meta action: I could look at what gets put on the screen (endless dystopias, especially about the climate, and when we finally get something that’s near-future cli-fi, it’s even worse), and I could think “it’s hopeless, no one will ever make a hopeful cli-fi TV series” and I could use that doomerism to justify NOT spending a whole bunch of time and effort creating a story that no one will produce.
I think you know this story has a different ending.
It’s a story that started in 2020 with me writing myself a life raft out of a horrible time, a book that would show how the world *could* be, the choices we *could* make that wouldn’t produce a utopia, but might just save us from incredible suffering. Writing that series was a conscious, determined choice to imagine a better future as a way to make it happen. My journey shifted into writing hopeful short fiction as well, and now this TV pilot that’s going to be the counter to the Extrapolations of the world. It’s my attempt to break the doom loop.
“You have to believe me,” George Clooney’s character in Tomorrowland says, that he knows the future is doomed.
“Why? Don’t we make our own destiny and stuff?” the younger character replies. And when she does, she breaks the doom loop.
I wish it were that simple.
But, in a way, it is. Simple but not easy. If it were easy, then we would do it by default. And that’s *also* the answer: we stay stuck in the doom loop because THAT IS EASY. It’s imagining a different future that’s hard.
But I’ve never let “hard” stop me.
If you need some help breaking the doom loop, watch Tomorrowland. Or read my Nothing is Promised series. Or write your own and enter it in the Imagine 2200 solarpunk contest. There’s nothing like taking a positive action to spur more positive actions.
It really is that simple.