Love and Robotics: Future Imperfect - or creating a dystopia
Early on I realised that the world of Love and Robotics would not only need to be an alternate universe but a dystopia. I knew then I would have to tread very, very carefully.
Dystopia must be one of the hardest genres to get right. Many, even the greats, are so busy detailing the horror of the world, the story itself is an afterthought. YA novels are especially prone to this. Although I've enjoyed stories such as The Hunger Games and Only Ever Yours, I was never wholly convinced by the settings. Twenty four children are sacrificed annually - okaaay. Women are no longer born naturally and burnt on pyres when they reach their forties - say what?! Since the unwritten rule is that the society always wins, you tend to be stuck with the kind of apathetic lead nobody wants to read about.
Bearing this in mind, the best dystopias are those where the protagonist is aware life used to be different. Take Offred from The Handmaid's Tale: she was an educated woman with a husband and daughter, living in the US in the late Eighties. One military takeover later, she's forced either to bear children for infertile high status couples or be exiled to die of radiation poisoning. The book is powerful precisely because it shows how easily such a coup might be accomplished and how ordinary women could lose their basic rights, even down to control of their own bodies.
An interesting variation is when, to all intents and purposes, the world should be a paradise. Perhaps the most famous example is Brave New World. Now that the population are mass produced test tube babies, concepts such as "mother" and "father" are obscene (a character is publicly humiliated when he's revealed to have made a woman pregnant). Thanks to being conditioned from an early age and drugged up to the eyeballs with soma pills, the citizens believe they're truly happy. It takes an outsider, John the Savage, to recognise it for the shallow, loveless nightmare it is.
I wanted to create a society that is superficially similar to ours, even an improvement in some areas, but far from ideal when you scratch the surface. For instance, they are much more technologically advanced, with hyperrealistic robots and flying cars, but this is at the expense of history and conservation. The fight for equal rights is reversed, with men regarded as the weaker sex. Rather than being some idyllic Lady Land, men face the same degrading battles and assumptions women do in our reality. Even their language reflects this. You wouldn't believe how time consuming and difficult it is to erase the biased and/or sexist phrases we all use without thinking. Their church persecutes robot/human relationships with single minded vitriol, though they still condemn gay ones.
Alfred and Josh bond because they can see the flaws in their world: Alfred because he remembers a better time; Josh because he's innocent and hasn't grown up with centuries of psychic baggage. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Dystopia must be one of the hardest genres to get right. Many, even the greats, are so busy detailing the horror of the world, the story itself is an afterthought. YA novels are especially prone to this. Although I've enjoyed stories such as The Hunger Games and Only Ever Yours, I was never wholly convinced by the settings. Twenty four children are sacrificed annually - okaaay. Women are no longer born naturally and burnt on pyres when they reach their forties - say what?! Since the unwritten rule is that the society always wins, you tend to be stuck with the kind of apathetic lead nobody wants to read about.
Bearing this in mind, the best dystopias are those where the protagonist is aware life used to be different. Take Offred from The Handmaid's Tale: she was an educated woman with a husband and daughter, living in the US in the late Eighties. One military takeover later, she's forced either to bear children for infertile high status couples or be exiled to die of radiation poisoning. The book is powerful precisely because it shows how easily such a coup might be accomplished and how ordinary women could lose their basic rights, even down to control of their own bodies.
An interesting variation is when, to all intents and purposes, the world should be a paradise. Perhaps the most famous example is Brave New World. Now that the population are mass produced test tube babies, concepts such as "mother" and "father" are obscene (a character is publicly humiliated when he's revealed to have made a woman pregnant). Thanks to being conditioned from an early age and drugged up to the eyeballs with soma pills, the citizens believe they're truly happy. It takes an outsider, John the Savage, to recognise it for the shallow, loveless nightmare it is.
I wanted to create a society that is superficially similar to ours, even an improvement in some areas, but far from ideal when you scratch the surface. For instance, they are much more technologically advanced, with hyperrealistic robots and flying cars, but this is at the expense of history and conservation. The fight for equal rights is reversed, with men regarded as the weaker sex. Rather than being some idyllic Lady Land, men face the same degrading battles and assumptions women do in our reality. Even their language reflects this. You wouldn't believe how time consuming and difficult it is to erase the biased and/or sexist phrases we all use without thinking. Their church persecutes robot/human relationships with single minded vitriol, though they still condemn gay ones.
Alfred and Josh bond because they can see the flaws in their world: Alfred because he remembers a better time; Josh because he's innocent and hasn't grown up with centuries of psychic baggage. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
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