Black thoughts under blue skies

Dystopian literature seems to be booming. It has become easy to imagine a future in which the human world comes to a bitter end. We are so close to this outcome that our present can already sense this future. It whispers in the wind. It poisons the mind.

Of course, I also have ideas for dystopias. Three short stories, which contain different aspects of a truly undesirable development, can be read in my short story collection  “Machtschattenpiele (Power shadow games)”.

Sometimes, however, our reality is so grey and frightening that I don’t like to write that kind of literature anymore. It’s as if reality has long since overtaken the authors’ imagination. So I take my ideas to strange and foreign worlds. Should these worlds break, no one has to die here. Yet, I think that the problems of imaginary worlds also do reflect our situation and our life and give us reason for thought in our decision making. That’s what stories are for. That’s what fairy tales have always been for.

Another 50 years of humanity – that’s what they’ve calculated now. Of course, this is an if-then-conditional. It doesn’t have to happen like this, but IF we do nothing but destroy more and more of our world, THEN we shall soon cease to be able to survive or live the way we do now. By the way, the world as such is not going to end. Not even all animals will die. But we who live in a high-tech environment, will then be a thing of the past. Petrified bones in the dirt.

A few preppers may still endure a few years longer in some bunkers, until finally at some point they will kill each other with their hoarded weapons for the last vital goods.
Of course, it’s also possible that we’ll all be fighting over resources before that, until there may still be resources, but we no longer are there to use them. With the increasing brainless and irresponsible nationalism and jingoism, not only here, but everywhere, one can assume that every country, every region even will come to the conclusion that it is entitled to more than its neighbours.

We can only solve the problem together. None of the “lone decision-makers” has the knowledge anymore to achieve anything on their own. It wouldn’t help either. So we have to ask ourselves what we can all do together. And doing nothing at all means: It’ll be over in 2050. Denial won’t help, neither will noisy tantrums.

I didn’t plan to write anything political. But it had to come out.