I don’t know if I was prepared to post something like this today, Wednesday the 4th, 2026. Election news in this country has been uneven at best in the past decade. I still remember where I was on election night 2016, and not with any fondness.
But somehow we made it through to today. There is a new feeling in the air.
It is not HOPE. That was 2008. This feels different. This feels… consequental.
Time will tell.
However, it does feel like we’ve been given liberty to hope and dream again. Some of us never stopped. For many years, I have been the one person that several of my friends have turned to when they felt hopeless. I have an ability to see the silver lining in anything. And I have tennaciously clung to hope that we are better than we seem for years. Although at times even I have had moments where I felt like giving up and just throwing in the towel to become some bitter cynic.
There is power in hope. And more importantly, there is power in both writing about and writing with hope. Hope inspires us to hang on. It inspires us to believe that things can and will be better. It inspires us to dream big and make a positive future for everyone. Hope is not naive. Real hope accepts hardships and sees the world as it is. But it also asks how it can make things better. How can we improve our condition? Hope plots a course with the possiblity that someone might follow that light and lead us all to a better future.
It may sound weird to hear this coming from me if you’ve only read my short fiction. But my novels are almost all inherently hopeful. Even the horror ones. Sometimes they require hardship and sacrifice, but I have pretty much managed to avoid real downer endings.
I don’t think I could ever write GrimDark. They’re better off without me.
But I am in the middle of writing a novel now that takes my optimism a step further. I’m writing a pure sci-fi novel for the first time ever, and it’s going very well. While it is set in this world, I am looking at very real problems and hurdles and imagining what would happen if somehow we could overcome them. The book is set in 2063, and that’s plenty of time for us to make things better. And the future doesn’t fix everything, but it does aim big. It does give people something to be hopeful for.
Is it unrealistic? No more so than every other sci-fi fantasy novel on the market. And possibly less so. And if nothing else, showing a hopeful future where we manage to overcome our worst natures, work together, and build something amazing has a way of making that hope contagious. Science fiction dreams and those dreams inspire and spur the creation of the next world. I’d much rather imagine ambitious science that uplifts than someone else’s “Orphan Torment Matrix.”.
The great thing about writing about hope, is that anyone can do it. Look at the world around you. Look at the problems that you see. Imagine how it could be made better for everyone. Imagine big solutions. They don’t even have to be that realistic. Just dream big. And don’t just hope for a better future. Share that hope. Because your hope for a better tomorrow might be the one thing keeping someone you know from giving into dispair.
And you never know what it might inspire decades down the road.
In the meantime, I have a novel to finish. I look forward to sharing more about it when I’m done.
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