[LINK] "Plausibility, plots and the future"

[rfmcdonald]

Andrew Barton notes the importance for writers to create futures which are at least embedded in the pleasant.

Except for purely natural events, things tend to happen for a reason - even if that reason is no more complex than "nobody knew what the hell they were doing and, thus, screwed up royally." It's important to keep this in mind as a writer when you're threading your plots and watching the characters do what they do. One of the easy traps of fiction writing is to turn characters into marionettes; for the author to move them from place to place or from ignorance to revelation not because of the experiences that inform them or the evidence they can perceive, but because it's necessary to the story. Plots live and die on plausibility.

[. . .]

This is true in the big picture as well as the small - it holds up just as well when setting down histories as it does for heroes. Everything is affected by what came before it - earth-shattering revolutions don't really appear out of nowhere. In cases like the Revolutions of 2011 or the collapse of the Soviet Union, it's more the case that unfamilarity or a lack of on-the-ground information contributed to ideas that were thoroughly jossed by the will of the people.

[. . .]

A couple of years ago, I picked up a book called Canada in 2020: Twenty Leading Voices Imagine Canada's Future. This is not an anthology, this is not a work of speculative fiction - it's more a work of speculative articling, if such a term exists. Possibilities expressed within run the gamut from 2020 seeing Canada, less Quebec, become the fifty-first American state to immigration turning Toronto into a reflection of Sao Paulo to Canada's return to center stage as a prime supporter of international peacekeeping.

The first one, though, is something else - it's what got me thinking along these lines. "Imagining Canada's 153rd Birthday," by journalist and professor Andrew Cohen, takes a look ahead to Canada Day, 2020, and a Canada that isn't very much a country at all. At its core, it's based around the "Hotel Canada" idea, the concept that new immigrants to Canada are not integrating into this country but just living here. "No, this isn't your father's Canada," Cohen writes. "Nor is it the Canada of Sir John A. Macdonald, Mackenzie King, Lester Pearson, Brian Mulroney, Pierre Burton, Margaret Atwood, Michael Bliss, Douglas Coupland, or Avril Lavigne. They would not recognize it, and few in this new country would recognize them. The nation roams around under a cloud of amnesia, as if nothing happened before yesterday."

That last sentence is perhaps more true than Cohen intended. His Canada in 2020 is the loosest of confederations; for some reason that is not well explained, during the 2010s the provinces crept closer and closer toward autonomy. In 2010, the House of Commons shut down when "the federal government transferred its remaining powers to the provinces" - for some reason that is completely unexplained. The game effectively ended for the federal government in 2014, Cohen says, when the provinces started raising armies.

[. . .]

And so we come back to the issue of plausibility. The Great Recession notwithstanding - how believable do you find the concept of the provinces of Canada raising their own armies? What the hell are they going to do, fight Fenian raiders? In what world would a politician or party that went ahead and adopted such an indefensible takeover of an expensive federal responsibility not be turfed out of office at the first opportunity? Where are they getting their motivation?

Cohen's vision of Canada in 2020, Andrew notes, was published in a book dating from 2006. How do you transform Canada into a confederation of militarized provinces in fourteen years? I'd note that of the ten Canadian provinces and three territories, only Ontario and Québec do not outsource their provincial policing to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Anyway, go, read, comment.