Guest Post: Fantasies, Conspiracies and Trust

Guest Post: Fantasies, Conspiracies and Trust

Trust - now there’s a word.  A little old-fashioned maybe?  I mean, who do we really trust in this modern world - immediately, unreservedly, without question?  Those who take care of our money?  That rather stodgy pillar of local society so often portrayed in old black-and-white films but rarely now: the bank manager? … Well, no, not really.  What about those who take care of our truths?  The intrepid, incorruptible, unbending reporter determined to get to the bottom of a story yet always maintaining his, or her, integrity? … Well, no, once again, perhaps not.  So what about those who actually manage us?  Government itself?  Do we trust them?   They’re our representatives, but does that necessarily mean they’ll act in our best interest?

As SF goes, the step from the real world of today to the make-believe one of The Detainee Trilogy tomorrow, must be one of the shortest ever.  A time when the economy has crashed, when less fortunate citizens are being made to pay for what went wrong even though they played little part in creating it … Is that the Future?  Or is it Now?  Well, it’s both, of course.

The world of THE DETAINEE (and now, INTO THE FIRE – coming July 3^rd) is but a minor extrapolation of our own, and for me that’s one of its great strengths.  Is it so hard to imagine the government itself going broke?  Becoming progressively more desperate in its bid to maintain the status quo?  After all, we built this structure, is it impossible that one day we might tear it down?  Where would the first truly unconscionable cuts come when the government realized they weren’t receiving the revenue they needed to maintain our society as we know it?  How would they dress it up?  How would they try to sell it to us?  Clancy – an older person of no means – is told he’s being shipped out as part of the Island Rehabilitation Program, to make a new start, yet ends up living in hell.  While the kids – who can no longer be automatically offered education – are told they’re taking part in a ‘Golden Age of Leisure’, yet soon run riot, also ending up living in hell.    

A truly catastrophic reduction in state finances might well, of course, rapidly gather momentum.  ‘Too much going out, not enough coming in,’ as Clancy says, and as the demographics of their (our?) society changes, as a shrinking workforce tries to cope with sustaining the overwhelming needs of the rapidly mushrooming elderly and unemployed, the government might well be forced into turning to even more drastic  measures.      

But, you know, I have a theory that as much as we distrust many of our politicians, that we think they’re all making us pay for their duck palaces, awarding their friends contracts or making fortunes out of insider dealing, we still regard it as all a little – I don’t know - ‘amateurish’, ham-fisted, lacking imagination.  Even in such a dire situation we just might be inclined to believe in the ‘greater good’, that there would be those, perhaps even the majority, who would be trying to rectify the situation.  No, when it comes to real villainy, I think we’re much more inclined to think of private enterprise; that those massive conglomerates would be hovering in the sky, ready to swoop down at a moment’s notice and start picking over the body of government even before it was truly pronounced dead. 

Which is where the real villains of this saga come in - not government, but the dreaded Infinity: gradually inserting itself into the state, undermining what’s left of it by financing the introduction of some truly barbaric technology to maintain Law and Order – and Clancy and his friends have to go INTO THE FIRE.

I’m often asked, ‘Why dystopia?’, and there are many answers to that question, but one of them might well be that it’s so easy to find material.  We live in a world where people are living longer and longer, yet the care of them has become an exorbitant minefield.   How can the government possibly afford to look after us all when we live –as we are apparently going to do - to a hundred or more?  Yes, I know some solutions are being offered, but it seems to me that they’re just nibbling around the edges, that perhaps this situation – or certainly as it stands - is, in fact, unsolvable.  As for Infinity - a huge, omnipotent conglomerate - if we’ve learnt anything in the last few years it’s that – for whatever reason – there are those who want to get right into the very pith of our lives, find out what we’re doing, and exploit it. 

No wonder we find trust so hard now, why conspiracy theories abound: it’s a truly terrible world ….. Well, that is, unless you’re a writer.  In which case, you’ll find so much inspiration, so many plot lines, such a never-ending supply of material, you’ll have to live to at least a hundred to write about them all.

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Peter Liney, Into the Fire, June 2014

Part 2 of The Detainee Trilogy, INTO THE FIRE, is out in hardback and on Kindle on July 3^rd.  On the same day, Part 1, THE DETAINEE, is released in paperback.