Building a plausible utopia p1: Choosing a year.

If you are one of the like five people who has read my book, you might wonder: “Why 2164?” Or you might not, which is fair. But this is my hypothetical, so I’m a-runnin with it.

2164 is, after all, not so far in the future for a semi-utopian government to have taken hold. Often in science fiction, especially Utopian science fiction, you’ll find 2300, 2400, anything that puts a couple centuries between the world of the stories and the world of the present day.

And the change does, on reflection, seem quite dramatic. The world of First Contact sees a humanity that has moved beyond poverty, beyond hunger, beyond war. It is a world where the government is both efficient and effective, where the resources of a hundred stars are gathered and put to use for the betterment of mankind. Quite the departure from the present.

But I’d remark that, for me, 140 years felt like a long time. Or at least long enough to be plausible. After all, it was not until the 1960s that a woman could open her own bank account (and even then only with a signature from her husband). It was not until 2015 when gay marriage was legalized in the United States. Tech-wise, smart phone adoption had juuuust started in 2011.

In 9 more years, in 60 more years, what absurd injustices might I look back on and say: “Huh, they were still doing THAT?”. And in 2140, what injustice might a future generation scoff at, looking with bemusement and horror at the barbarians of 2080? What uncounted generations of ubiquitous technologies might have passed?

It is possible of course that 2164 looks nothing like what I imagine. And things have not always gone well in human history. But, based on our own history, perhaps the thing I have created is not so strange or unattainable as it may seem.