We are entering a new era in storytelling. The zeitgeist has changed. Or, as the kids would say, the vibe shift is no cap. 

Trying to sell a new book written for an old zeitgeist is like putting new wine in old wineskins. Or, to use a sci-fi metaphor, it’s like flying a Z-95 Headhunter up against a TIE Defender. Or it’s like trying to fight the Borg without proper shield modulation.  

Of all the genres, science fiction may be most affected by this cultural shift. If you can understand the shift in sci-fi, you will be more prepared for the shifts in your genre. Much is changing, including thoughts about wokeness, AI, WWII, population collapse, and more. But let me start here: if you write science fiction, you need to stop writing about climate change.

For the last 40 years, climate change has been the backdrop for most science fiction stories. In books like Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi, the primary conflict is a metaphor for climate change. In others like The Expanse, climate change, and overpopulation are the driving forces behind the off-planet conflicts in the story. Even the beloved Firefly opens with the phrase, “After the earth was used up…” 

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Declining Interest in Climate Change 

So why are readers weary of climate-coded stories? Why are they cliche? 

The forces behind the scenes pushing climate-change narratives are changing their priorities for several reasons.

The first is AI believe it or not. AI needs massive amounts of electricity to operate. Unlike crypto, which can reduce its electrical demand when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, AI needs electricity, particularly during peak hours. So, the big tech companies that were making money collecting government subsidies for green technology now see reusable energy as a competitive disadvantage. In the long term, companies with the cheapest electricity will make the most from AI, and green energy is still more expensive per KWH. 

China is building two new coal power plants every week. China now accounts for 32% of world CO₂ emissions. China adds more CO₂ to the atmosphere than the US and Europe combined.  Many American readers feel they’ve already done their part to reduce CO2 emissions. But even if America closed one coal power plant every week, it would fail to offset the two new plants China is building every week.

International leaders now see energy as the primary source of political power on the world stage. Whoever has the cheapest electricity will be the most powerful country for manufacturing, AI, and crypto. Cash, technology, and manufacturing are necessary to win a war. 

Follow the Money

Russia funded many green nonprofits, particularly in Europe. For years, their goal was to convince Europeans to stop drilling for fossil fuels and instead buy fuel from Russia. For Russia, backing the green movement in Europe was a cheap way to reduce competition. And for a time, all was well. Europeans were happy to pay a premium, and Russia was happy to collect a premium. 

Then, everything changed when the fire nation attacked. At the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe cut Russia off from the green NGOs it supported. As the first winter approached, Europe realized that relying on Russian fossil fuels was a bad idea. The European Greens’s influence has collapsed as a result.

The Greens in the US face similar issues as they lose political funding from agencies like USAID. With funding drying up at home and abroad, climate change organizations are finding it difficult to advance their message. The cheapest way to get the message out is to blame natural disasters on the victims of those disasters. It’s always Florida’s fault they have hurricanes because of climate change. 

But, blaming people for the weather sounds like irritating badgering after a while. There was very real suffering when Texas experienced the snowpocalypse in 2021. A beloved family member of mine died during that snowstorm, and instead of offering a helping hand, the Greens pointed a finger of accusation. This did not incline Texans to listen to them. Plus, Texas generates more green energy than any other state, but it’s never enough.

Sometimes, bad weather happens, and it’s no one’s fault.

It turns out that making carbon sacrifices to propitiate the climate change gods won’t save you from tragedies, as the Californians who suffered in the LA fires can attest.

The Science of Climate Change

Have you ever wondered how plants grow? When you plant a seed in a clear cup of soil, a green plant soon grows out of that soil. But the soil is still there, so where does the mass of the plant come from if not from the soil? 

Most of the mass in a plant comes from carbon from the air. The plant uses the sun’s power to break the C from CO₂. It keeps the C carbon, and the O₂oxygen is released into the air. The more CO₂ in the air, the more food plants have. 

The fundamental premise behind climate change is that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. But, from another perspective, carbon dioxide is plant food. The abundance of CO₂ has led to more plants in more places, resulting in a greening earth, as NASA calls it.

All human activity results in CO₂. Every breath you take and every bite of food you eat involves you releasing CO₂ into the air. That means control over CO₂ is a proxy for control over all human activity. If I can control your carbon output, I can control every aspect of your life.  

Readers are starting to see climate change as a proxy for control. So, unless you are writing a dystopian novel where the government uses the fear of climate change to control the population, the classic climate change story won’t vibe with readers like it used to.  

More Reading:

• Global warming was overestimated by 42% because of unaccounted-for weather station aging.
• Human activities are responsible for only 4% of carbon emissions. 

The Myth of Overpopulation

Another common concept in fiction is overpopulation. While the scientific theories behind overpopulation were debunked decades ago, they persist in science fiction. According to the Population Bomb theory, when the population of Earth grew to four or five billion people, mass starvation would ensue. Now that eight billion people populate Earth, obesity is a bigger global problem than hunger. The greening Earth is real. There is so much surplus food on the planet right now that the only way to create a famine is to first start a war. 

The science behind overpopulation has been wrong for decades, so why has overpopulation only recently stopped resonating with readers?  Because Earth is facing a population collapse.

The population projections were wrong, and many nations are shrinking. The rate of population collapse is accelerating as many countries find out they are not only low on babies but they are also low on young people who can make babies.

As Peter Zehan points out, in China, there are more people over the age of 50 than under the age of 50. Soon there will be more people over age 60 than under age 60.

In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.68 babies per woman, and the birth rate continues to drop every year as the population ages. At the current rate, two-thirds of South Korea’s population will disappear every generation. There is a potential scenario where North Korea will win the Korean War simply by having more babies. Within one generation, they may be able to walk over an empty DMZ to inherit a high-tech country filled with elderly pensioners. They aborted their babies, and now they have no future. Talk about fodder for an interesting sci-fi story! 

A less intense version of that population collapse is happening in Russia, Canada, China, Japan, Spain, and the rest of the developed world. Canada has more people over the age of 40 than under it.

Why are so many developed countries facing population crashes? 

We don’t know. 

But there are theories. Fertility rates seem to correlate with feminism. The more feminist a country becomes, the lower the birth rate. Countries with low rates of feminism, like Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan, still have sustainable birth rates. While countries with high levels of feminism, like Italy, Canada, and Spain, have very low birth rates. Correlation is not causation, though, and many other factors correlate with birth rates, like decadence, urbanization, and secularism.  

As a novelist, you can explore the potential causes in your fiction

One question we will have to answer in the coming century is how much feminism a nation can handle before the population starts collapsing. How many babies can you abort before there are no more young people to make new babies? It would be an interesting question for sci-fi authors to explore. 

Growing Distrust of Experts

Another shift in the zeitgeist is a growing distrust of experts. Many readers now think that experts say whatever they are paid to say. Court cases regularly have experts from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton on both sides of the argument. The same phenomenon is seen in scientific studies. Studies tend to report findings that favor those who paid for them. If the findings are not favorable, the study is not published. And with so few studies being replicated, it’s surprisingly cheap to influence scientific findings.

At some point, peer review replaced replication as the gold standard of the scientific method. Peer review can only evaluate methods; it can’t evaluate outcomes for cutting-edge science. Most fields of science are facing a replication crisis right now, where most scientific findings are unreproducible. And when new unreproducible finding are based on old unreproducible findings the whole apparatus starts to look like a house of cards.

The effectiveness of paying for scientific results is one reason it took 40 years for scientists to determine that smoking was unhealthy. For decades, the tobacco industry funded a lot of studies, which found smoking to be benign and even beneficial! Some of you are old enough to remember ads that said, “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”  

When a scientist tells you not to question “the science,” they are violating the very point of the scientific method. Science is not a religion with answers. It’s a method of asking questions. 

The only way to advance scientific progress is to “question the science.” 

The only way to advance scientific progress
is to “question the science.” 

For example, Albert Einstein never believed in quantum mechanics. He spent decades attacking every vulnerability in quantum mechanics he could find. Every time Einstein found a vulnerability, scientists like Neils Bohr had to improve the theory to account for Einstein’s critiques. Consequently, Einstein may have done more to advance quantum mechanics as a critic than he would have as an ally.  

If your scientific discovery is valid, it thrives on questioning. Reevaluating the findings to answer tough questions makes the discovery more robust. On the other hand, if a discovery is fraudulent, those behind it will avoid questions and investigations. The intensity with which “climate change deniers” have been persecuted makes me suspect a great deal of fraud behind the scenes. Time will tell. It seems to me that if the discoveries were valid, the discoverers would welcome critique. 

What to Write About

So enough about what not to write about. What sci-fi topics will resonate with readers in this new zeitgeist? 

The sci-fi story formula often looks like this: You take near-future politics, combine it with an ancient historical context, and set it in a far-future setting.

These aren’t the Romans; they are Romulans named after Romulus, who founded Rome. These are not WWII-era Japanese warriors; they are Klingons. These aren’t Arab warriors pouring out of the desert in a holy war against the weak and decadent urban population of the 7th century; they are the Desert Fremen of Dune. I could go on, but if you write sci-fi, you likely already know this. 

By playing with your setting a bit, you can explore current-day issues with ancient history, and most readers won’t realize what you are doing or why they love your writing.

With that in mind, let’s look at some current or near-future events and put them in a historical context. I’ll leave the far future setting up to your fertile imagination.  

Population Collapse

We have already talked about the collapse of the population in the near future. What historical context would usefully guide your story? Any major plague could work. For example, look at what happened with Yersinia pestis or Justinian’s plague in the sixth century.  

Yersinia pestis returned to urbanized areas over and over, dramatically reducing the population of Byzantine cities. Meanwhile, in the desert, it returned less often and killed far fewer people. 

The population collapse in Constantinople was so intense that they built farms inside the city walls. It sounds crazy until you realize the same thing is already happening in Detroit. Detroit has seen plague-level depopulation in my lifetime and no one is talking about it. 

What are the indirect effects of population collapse you could use in your story? 

Repeated outbreaks of Yersinia pestis over a century reshaped populations and laid the groundwork for the military rise of Islam. Arabs poured out of a typically empty desert to violently conquer Christian cities like Carthage, Tripoli, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Damascus. A population collapse allowed for an invasion that led to a permanent change in religion for cities that had been Christian since the first century. 

With that perspective, the idea of North Korea winning the Korean War doesn’t seem so preposterous, does it?

I think there is at least as much sci-fi fodder in population collapse as there was in overpopulation. Someone please tell a story that takes place in a ghost city.

Totalitarian Control

Countries like the UK and Australia have recently gotten rid of free speech. You could argue they never had it in the first place, but the UK now jails more political dissidents for speaking out against the government than Russia does. And to be clear, I’m not defending Russia. Russia is the worst, and they treat dissidents terribly. It’s a shame the home of Magna Carta is no better.  

UK citizens receive harsh punishments and are sentenced to years in prison over social media posts or for praying in the wrong place about the wrong thing. 

Recently, the UK has demanded backdoor access to every iPhone in the world. Your phone is with you for every private conversation, and the UK government wants access to those conversations. 

What does it look like to live in a country that uses your phone to track everywhere you go, everything you say, and everything you do? What happens when you need a phone in the palm of your hand to buy or sell? What keeps the UK government from sharing the data it collects from American citizens with the American intelligence community? The US Constitution doesn’t apply to subjects of the Crown.  

Orwell’s 1984 needs an update, and the first sci-fi author to get a remake right will make millions. 1984 was in the top 100 bestselling books last year, and in 2021, it was the 24th bestselling book on all of Amazon for the entire year.  Not the 24th bestselling scifi book, the 24th bestselling book period.

Ask yourself, what are the knock-on effects of that level of a surveillance state? Will people abandon their phones for privacy? 

If you think this kind of censorship can’t happen in America, I invite you to check out this episode on YouTube. See if YouTube has limited your access to it or put any disclaimers under the video. This kind of treatment is so common now we rarely even notice it. 

Speaking of YouTube, please like, subscribe, and share. This video will need all the help it can get. 

AI

AI was a big element of 20th-century sci-fi, and I think it will continue to be big in the 21st century. But views toward AI are shifting. In the 20th century, the question authors explored was, “What if computers had a mind of their own and attacked us?” Then later the question was “can humans and computers fall in love.” Moving forward, the more interesting question is, “How will evil humans use the power of AI to control other humans?” 

A sadistic human with the power of AI is scarier than an emotionless computer. What is scarier, Ultron, Thanos, or Thanos controlling Ultron? 

For example, AI powers most of censorship around the world. China has an AI that tracks all human behavior and gives each person a social credit score. People with low scores lose basic freedoms like the right to travel. 

Facebook uses AI to determine who sees what. YouTube uses AI to read video transcripts and judge which video to favor and which to censor. If a creator disagrees with a ruling, the first round of appeals will go to an AI judge.

In sci-fi lingo, global corporations have court systems run by machines to control humans. And remember, machines are incapable of mercy. 

Amazon delivery drivers have AI bosses who track how fast they drive, where they go, and how hard they work. It all runs through an app on their phone. For millions of American workers, their boss is an AI on their phone. 

AI judges and AI bosses. This is present day sci-fi! Are you not entertained? What are the indirect effects? Your fiction will help us navigate this new world. 

Woke Mind Virus 

In 1976, Richard Dawkins noticed that ideas can spread like viruses. He called these viral ideas memes. This is the origin of concepts like viral marketing and meme images that spread on social media. 

One of the more pernicious ideas currently spreading is wokeness. Once someone’s mind is infected with the woke mind virus, they start to think it’s ok for mothers to castrate their sons, chemically sterilize their daughters, and kill their unborn babies. This is an anti-human idea that, if it spreads to enough people, could lead to species extinction. 

But don’t worry. Just like the body fights physical viruses with antibodies, there are ways to combat harmful mind viruses. Historically, religion has served as a culture’s immune system. And we are seeing a rise in religious interest among young men as they intuitively sense a need for a cultural immune system boost. 

In addition to religion, the scientific process has some cultural immune system properties for the most lethal mind viruses. Wokeness is so deadly that even scientists are flagging some of its more dangerous aspects.  

Currently, science and religion have started to work together to push against the worst aspects of the woke mind virus. The castration, genital mutilation, and chemical sterilization of children, which were applauded a few years ago, are now held with suspicion or derision. What was once state-funded is now illegal in places like Texas and England. 

The cultural immune system has started flagging the mind virus, and the white blood cells of legislation and social action are starting the eradication process. The campaign slogan that led to the first landslide victory for Republicans in decades said, “Kamala Harris is for they/them; Donald Trump is for you.” This was one of the most effective political advertisements in decades. It shifting the vote by 2.7% which was enough to win every swing state.

Sci-fi authors have the potential to explore the effects of mind viruses. What happens to people once they recover from the woke mind virus? What happens once they realize the harm they’ve done to their children? Can society forgive them? Can their children forgive them? Can they forgive themselves? The soil is fertile for sci-fi authors to explore.

Fiscal Collapse

Most civilizations don’t end by losing some decisive war. They end in financial collapse and civil war. This was true with the Romans, the Qing Dynasty, the Kingdom of France, and the list goes on and on. When the money runs out, the rebellions and civil wars begin. It’s internal friction that breaks the throne. Just ask Rehoboam, the last king of the Old Testament’s united kingdom and the first king of Judah. 

It took the United States of America 205 years to accrue a national debt of one trillion dollars. In that time we paid for:

• two world wars
• one civil war
• a border war
• a war of imperial conquest
• two defensive wars
• a cold war
• a New Deal
• a Great Society
• a space race,
• the building of thousands of cities across a mostly empty continent.

America did all of that with less than a trillion dollars of debt.

Now that we add one trillion dollars to the debt every six months, and yet we struggle to keep the cities our ancestors built from crumbling into ruin. 

Something is very wrong, and if unchecked, it will destroy the government. 

Deficit spending is like bleeding. You can lose a certain amount of blood and be fine. A healthy person can donate a pint of blood on Monday, go back to the gym on Wednesday, and donate blood again in two months. But if you lose too much blood, you will die. It’s never particularly clear in the moment how much blood someone can lose and survive. 

Right now, the United States is hemorrhaging money. We know the deficit will kill the government, but we don’t know when. Just like with bleeding to death, the collapse will happen little by little and then all at once. One year everything is normal, and the next year nothing is the same. 

The United States currently gets blood infusions from around the world. The dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency allows us to export levels of inflation that would kill a normal country. Foreign countries hold vast amounts of US dollar-denominated securities and can only buy petroleum in US dollars. For example, China needs US dollars to buy petroleum from Kuwait.  

This means that an economic collapse in the United States would have global ripple effects. If you don’t believe me, remember that in 2008, a 20% downturn in the US housing market caused an economic collapse in Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain. Greece has still not fully recovered from it, and that was a mere 20% downturn in just one US sector. 

If you want a historical parallel to inspire your sci-fi about a governmental collapse, look at the Bronze Age Collapse. Egypt, the world superpower in those days, used its immense wealth to prop up empires from Britain in the west to Afghanistan in the East. Britain and Afghanistan were the primary sources of tin, a crucial ingredient for bronze. This was an era of great wonders, pyramids, and vast populations. The bronze age lasted for a thousand years. When it collapsed, it all came crashing down in one year.

And when I say collapse, I don’t just mean Egypt. All the empires collapsed around the same time. The Hittite Empire, Assyrian Empire, and Babylonian Empires all collapsed. Greece entered a dark age, and the British Isles faced population collapse. What caused the Bronze Age collapse? I’m not going to tell you. 

I’m not even going to give you a hint. 

Do you feel that curiosity? That itch to know more? That is the kind of curiosity that could pull a reader through your sci-fi novel. 

I will give you a clue. If you want to learn more, read the book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Affiliate Link). That book will give you a lot of ideas for your sci-fi world. 

Finally, no talk about the future would be complete without discussing the next world war. 

World War III

The temptation is to assume the next war will be like the last war. But history tells us the last war is the one war the next war won’t be like. The typical prediction of WWIII is that there will be some nuclear-powered clash between great powers because that’s how the last world war went.

WWII featured all sides targeting civilian cities for military purposes. Whether it was the London Blitz, the Firebombing of Dresden, the rape of Nanking, or the atomic bomb, over 50 million civilians died in WWII. The devastation led Einstein to quip: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

However, the next war will always be different from the last war. I suspect WWIII will be both bigger and smaller than WWII. Also, it may have already begun, and historians may pick the US withdrawal from Afghanistan as the starting point. 

Let me explain. 

After WWII, the United States wanted no more World Wars, so we created and funded the United Nations. We placed the headquarters in New York City, where we could keep an eye on things. The US used the UN to ensure national borders remained unchanged. American military personnel put on UN uniforms to fight in “UN police actions.” My grandfather served in the “Korean Police Action” and received medals from the UN for his service. 

In 1945, the US military started policing land and sea. This ensured that the next world war would be a cold war and that conflicts between great powers would be fought between proxies.  

Then, for 80 years, nations knew that if they invaded a neighbor, they would have to fight that neighbor and the United States. 

For example, Iraq had a historic (albeit arguable) claim to the nation of Kuwait. Kuwait was smaller and weaker. Its existence and borders were a product of the colonial map drawers of yesteryear. The lines on the map did not reflect the facts on the ground. So, Iraq invaded Kuwait to “fix the map” and claim the resources by right of conquest. Up to that point, it was an otherwise unremarkable event that’s happened thousands of times in human history. Normally, Kuwait would have quickly become an Iraqi province. 

But in 1990, there was a global police force with one primary rule: No invasions. 

Iraq ended up fighting Kuwait and the full power of the United States military. Kuwait had border protection, which it didn’t even have to pay for. 

We pushed over the Iraqi armed forces in a matter of weeks and sent a strong signal to every other nation in the world not to mess with their neighbors. The US military showed the world it was strong enough to win any border dispute anywhere in the world. 

The threat of American retaliation kept most nations of the world from even trying to invade a neighbor without first getting permission from the Americans or protection from the Russians. 

Then, everything changed when America withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. 

America pulled out of Afghanistan in a way that left the Taliban billions of dollars worth of high-end military gear they could easily sell to the highest bidder. We also gave them the key to defeating the United States military. If a country wants to beat the US military, they only need one thing… patience. 

The Taliban lost every battle and every engagement. There would be battles where the Taliban took massive casualties and, despite six hours of constant conflict, failed to kill a single American. And yet, the Taliban now controls Afghanistan and has American military equipment to hold it. The saying among Taliban leadership was, “The Americans have the watches, but we have the time.”   

Forcing all the world’s nations to get along is emotionally, financially, and morally exhausting. Leaving Afghanistan signaled to the world that America might be retiring as the global policeman. 

What happened next? Over the next couple of years, Russia invaded Ukraine. Gaza attacked Israel. Syria attacked Israel, Azerbaijan invaded Armenia, Turkey attacked the Kurds in Syria, and Turkey attacked the Kurds in Iraq, and Rwanda invaded the DNC. Civil wars popped off or intensified in Nigeria, Yemen, Niger, Myanmar, and border wars are breaking out all over Africa. And then, Yemen attacked shipping in the Red Sea. 

Now, Ethiopia is threatening to invade Eritrea. China is threatening to invade Taiwan, and Venezuela is threatening to conquer Guyana.

From a certain perspective, the next world war has already started, but instead of being a war between the great powers, it’s between all the little powers settling 80 years of border disputes at the same time. It’s like The Purge on a global scale.  

Right now, most sci-fi wars look a lot like WWII in space. Big, unified empires fighting big, unified alliances. For your next sci-fi story, consider a balkanized galaxy with dozens of unrelated regional conflicts. Your protagonist could travel through war zones to which they hold no allegiance or sympathy with either side. Or your protagonist could work as a mercenary traveling from conflict to conflict. There is a lot of room for political intrigue when a dozen factions have different goals and enemies. 

Final Thoughts

This is a great time to be a sci-fi author! We face a whole new world of technological, cultural, political, and psychological challenges as a species. Readers are desperate for books that reflect the current reality, hopes, dreams, and fears they face today.

Most authors are still telling the climate change story over and over again. Most authors are still writing WWII in space. In a world of tired cliches, sci-fi readers are desperate for something fresh, and you could be the one to give it to them. Yesterday’s books have already been written. Now’s your chance to write tomorrow’s story.

The next big names in sci-fi are writing their breakout novels right now. You could be one of them!  

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A Milestone!

This is our 450th officially numbered episode. Novel Marketing has changed a lot since our first episode back in 2013. This episode is perhaps our most controversial one yet and most likely to get me canceled. I’m thankful I’m not dependent on global corporations to keep the podcast on the air. Listeners and readers like you keep this podcast going, and I appreciate every one of you. Thank you for being patrons. Thank you for buying courses. Thank you for telling your friends. I wouldn’t be here without you. 

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