This morning, while meditating an idea stroke me out of thin air. An idea of a story I could tell. During only a few minutes it become so strong I couldn’t keep on meditating anymore, I took my diary and started writing down this flow of thoughts. What I came up with is a story placed in a dystopian and not-so-far future that could be the base for my first-ever novel. In this essay, I would like to lay out the first few basic aspects of the world and the story itself.
I see the story unfolding somewhere around the year 2050 (at least the beginning of it). In this not-so-far future, the few main corporations have all the power in the world, they overthrew pretty much all the governments. They control people and especially men are used only as a slave-working class. They have no right to have a partner as they cannot afford them which means that in this hierarchy the top 10% each have like 5-10 wives and all that working people on the bottom have is porn and virtual AI girlfriends. (All of this will be normal like kids for their 18th birthday will just get their AI girlfriend). I still don’t quite know how are those low-people born as they won’t have partners but I will for sure figure this out. Each person is from nearly the day they’re born connected to the internet, by some device that is inside their body they can catch signals and connect (but they’re also tracked by that.). Thanks to that device, the ‘Government’ knows everything about them, they have a brutally large database of every person (it’s ultra hi-tech like they’re saving data into living creature’s DNA because you can save so many things into that, classic databases are just non-practical.)
Governments are not banning anything, at first glance, it seems like a perfect utopia as nothing is banned and people are totally ‘free’, the problem is, that they’re completely hypnotized and manipulated by the internet that is controlled by these few companies.
Then there comes our Hero into a story. He’s an outsider. No friends. Doing absolutely basic work but is different thanks to his father and the way he raised him (before he died). Hero is the first generation that was born into this world, the revolution was peaceful and very fast and happened during the life of the hero’s father but because of good internet propaganda, most people are washed up into thinking it was always like this. Back to Hero. He’s one of the few people on the planet that reads books. That is considered dangerous and this act makes him an outlier as people look bad at him. But he realized that books are the only thing that can’t be changed, it’s the only place he can the truth about the past. So he doesn’t care no one likes him, he’s got the truth that seems right to him and that’s enough, he lives his life until one moment. One day he finds his father’s diaries and they become his mentor once again. Besides things like how his father dealt with loneliness, depression, and addiction Hero will pretty soon find out that it was his father that was one of the MAIN engineers when it come to the creation of ‘THE ENEMY’ (not yet sure what it will be, probably one giga corporation or even better new social medium that completely controls people and became their entire life.). Throughout the story Hero—thanks to diaries—starts to find around himself like-minded people, and realize he’s not alone. That gives him hope. Throughout the diaries he finds out that his father realized what is he doing and what terrible stuff it can do, so he started to work on a plan for how to destroy it but ‘THE ENEMY’ found out and killed him (it was presented as a suicide until this point of a story). Thanks to diaries Hero learns how to ‘cure himself’ of the ’tracking’ device that is inside him. He cures all the rest of his friends and starts a small free community somewhere out of the city. (can be the end of the first book). Then he slowly but surely starts to build a resistance and the rest of the book will be much more large scale where he’s the leader of resistance trying to destroy this regime.
Here’s a lot of potential for some inner conflicts like that he doesn’t want to be that leader, doesn’t want that much responsibility and stuff like that, or maybe the question if they’re doing the right thing by waking people up (especially the working man as the real-life without constant simulation just sucks, etc, etc).
This is the first and plain idea I got and I think I can build a lot on that. I will start to work on world-building to set some rules for it. Then the characters, then the basic plot, and then I can begin to write. I feel extremely enthusiastic about this it really feels like a good idea and I’ve been waiting for it.
I will take inspiration from books and movies such as 1984, Brave New World, Wall-e, matrix, Fight Club, Zarathustra (last man), Blade Runner, and more. It will be cool to mix those ideas with my own and add on top the escalated problems of the 21st century like social media, addictions, porn, incels, red pill, and everything like this.
It’s time to go to work as I’ve got a lot to do.