/lit/ - Literature

>>11991677

I appreciate the comments, anon. You make good points, and have given me some things to think about.

The famine and wars are mostly tied to consequences of climate change, like the aforementioned storms and desertification, and are more of a context for "present day" than something depicted. The rush to produce a robotic luxury society came from that, and things just went wrong along the way. The Rich and Powerful doing their thing, essentially.

Side note, the AGI-run utopia in orbit is an actual utopia, but it's hard to get to thanks to travel outside the cities being so difficult, and it only lets in people who aren't fucko's. It has plans of its own that are bigger than the daily lives on people, but that's not explored in this story. It mostly just keeps to itself. There are groups of people who resent the seeming unattainability of it all, as well as the existence of an Artificial General Intelligence itself, and desire to destroy it and the space-habitat if they can. The AI acts as a stand-in for God that people can direct their hate towards, and blame for their lot in life. The utopia represents an ideal world just out of reach, and angry people are more like to destroy something beautiful than do something productive about their own situation.

I'm not well-read in philosophy—I mostly just read wiki pages because actually getting into and reading up on all the schools of thought is an investment in time I just don't have at this point in my life—but I was a bit inspired by Camus and his solutions to the absurd, and how a potential future would react to a new existential dilemma and the (what is seem as) inevitable collapse of global civilization. The distinct lack of aliens on top of everything else has convinced a lot of the population that the Earth will not make it through the Great Filter, and there is no glorious sci-fi future waiting for them.

I figure people might react with rage-quitting, nihilism, escapism (VR being an ultimate escape, but keeping that for richfags is something to consider), indulgence, revolt, defiance, etc.

I haven't decided if there's a specific meaning or solution I want to express by the end, I'm not really an outliner. But the MC certainly isn't satisfied with any of them, and inside themselves are mostly raging against the scale of the universe, the untold billions or trillions of years ahead that will be unseen and untouched by any life, the pointlessness of it all, and the lacking of a grand function or nature to creation. I don't know how MC will feel, or think, or do by the end.