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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY PAMELA SARGENT
Dream of Venus and Other Science Fiction Stories
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Another notion that appealed to me was creating a future Earth dominated politically and culturally by Muslims. This had less to do with extrapolating a possible future and more to do with my desire to create a future that felt connected to our present and our past while also being convincingly strange and different. A story or novel for me almost always begins with a character (sometimes more than one character) trying to tell me a story. The character who began speaking to me when I first thought of writing Venus of Dreams was a young woman in North America trapped among the well-meaning but ignorant members of her family, with apparently no way out and no way to become part of the effort to terraform Venus. Only after I had written about her, and had completed a rough early draft of the novel, did I begin to get a fuller picture of her world. This future Earth was made up of nomarchies, provinces with a certain amount of cultural individuality and political autonomy but dominated by a council based in the Middle East and largely made up of Muslims. It seemed reasonable to assume that people there and in remnants of Russia and the East might pick up the pieces of an Earth ravaged by climate change and earlier conflicts that I called the Resource Wars. I didn’t lay out the background of my novel, the future history, charts of governmental and Venus Project hierarchies, maps, a chronology, and all the rest until I’d finished that first draft, which is normal for me even if it seems to be doing things in the wrong order. I have to let my characters clue me in, and only then can I dig into the details of their histories and cultures.
Given this backwards way of working, I’ve found myself surprised that I seem to have done a better job of prognosticating than I thought possible. The future history of climate change, diminishing resources, failing educational systems (most of the people in the Venus books, those who are not among the elite who have gained their power through the control of both resources and information, are illiterate or close to it), mosques dotting the American landscape (accompanied unfortunately by a rabid xenophobia that I hadn’t anticipated), deepening political divisions, and diminishing expectations is rushing upon us more quickly than I envisioned, and I am not at all convinced that it will lead to a terraforming project like the one I imagined or indeed to a promising or sustainable future.
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