While I constructed an entire future history of the Earth and mankind, that is not what I am referring to. What I was thinking was just as history is a (more or less) common remembrance of past events, maybe somehow, as a species, we had a common remembrance of the future.
For example, we've all seen science fiction movies where all anybody wears is white, people talk in soft monotones, computers are always plotting the overthrow of man and so on. Staples of most futuristic societies have spaceships, transporters, aliens, ray guns and the like.
So I thought to myself that if I created a future culture that contained every stereotype of our future perception, maybe it would transcend being a rehash and maybe feel more like this really was how our future was. Then the characters could move about in a universe that everybody was already familiar without necessarily having to spell out every detail.
It got to the point where, when I did not have a future stereotype, I had to explain it. While the chapters in the book are not named, I had private names for each. There was one chapter called "Where are all your robots?" because that was a nagging question throughout the first three-quarters of Rome's Revolution. That is when Rome launched into her discourse about The Robot War which we learned later was actually started by MASAL.
Entry 1-070: March 5, 2013
Did Rome's Revolution really happen?
The tag line "This story is true, it just didn't happen yet" is meant to be more than simply clever. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I was trying to construct a future history which was sort of a future racial (or species) memory.
I know it sounds crazy but I really believe it. There are so many instances where I threw stuff into the book for no reason, only to discover weeks, months, sometimes years later that made sense.
I have already given some examples. When Rei "recognized" Rome, I had no explanation of that until I started writing Rome's Evolution. I explained away no robots by inventing The Robot War which then merged beautifully into MASAL. MASAL, in turn, gave me the Onsiras which explained Estar. I wanted a villain in the Part 1 but never had a reason why she would want Rei dead.
The list goes on and on. The entire book The Ark Lords fell out of one reviewer's comments saying that Captain Keller and to a lesser degree the people in the front of the Ark II were behaving irrationally. I also had the random fact of The Great Dying which was always part of my "future history" but I always thought it was just a terrorist's attack gone wrong. All of the sudden, it clicked, the two events were related. BOOM! A new novel.
And finally, in a previous post, I discussed Rome's nightmare. I never had an explanation for her terrible dream until I was writing the end of Rome's Evolution. So either it is just the phenomenon of creating a consistent, uniform future history and people just behave consistently or... (and this is the explanation I prefer) ...these stories really are true, they just didn't happen yet!