One thing that keeps coming up in reviews of The Electric Church and interviews and all that jazz is dystopias. You know, those broken imagined futures where everything has gone to shit? TEC is obviously set in a dystopia, sure—any place where the cops are more likely to kill you than serve out justice and where cyborgs plot to steal your brain and eat your knowledge is the opposite of a utopia, I think.
I’ve always liked dystopias. Same way I’ve always liked murder and sadness and funerals—for fiction, that is. Happiness is boring. When you’re happy you mix up some cocktails and sit on the deck enjoying the sunset and murmur things like sure is pretty and who in hell wants to read the literary equivalent of that?
When you’re sad and angry, however, the deck holds no joy for you, so you put on a jacket and get out on the street to walk to the local bar for a few bitter shots, and along the way you purposefully bump someone with your shoulder because you’re pissed, and then they spin and yell at you and the next thing you know you’re spitting teeth into the curb and miserable.
Now, that’s interesting. I can write a story about that.
Utopias? Not so much. Even regular old balanced worlds are kind of boring, if you ask me. But my eye always goes for the rot underneath, the horror of a world you don’t actually have any control over. I think that’s the difference—those of us who imagine they have some control over the world imagine utopias or at least balanced worlds. Those of us who believe we’re all just sliding down a meltstream of existential suffering into a big blob of meaninglessness, well, we see Dystopias.
As with much that I say, this is pure, ignorant opinion. I have no proof or evidence to display, aside from my certainty that I am right. You’d be amazed how often people don’t accept that as “evidence” however.