The story behind the story: Citadel

John Gilbey makes a welcome return to Futures this week with a dystopian vision in Citadel. John is no stranger to Futures — his first story for us appeared way back in 2005, and since then he has written some 16 other visions of the future (there’s a full list of his Futures stories at the end of this post). You can keep up-to-date with John by following him on Twitter. Here, he reveals just what is so attractive about dystopian visions. As ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Citadel

Earlier this year, I gave a talk to a group of journalists in New York about my science-fiction stories and how they relate to the regular science reporting that I also do. When it came to the time for questions, and I had already started eyeing the table of snacks that the hosts had kindly provided, someone raised an interesting question.

“What is it with science-fiction writers and dystopias?” he asked, going on to point out that you can barely move in book stores these days for stacks of sinister vampire fiction, savagely wrought tales of post-nuclear wastelands, startling portrayals of werewolf family life and other dark and doom-laden literature.

I can only speak for myself — and sometimes can’t even reliably manage that — so this may not be why other writers invest so much of themselves in the fields of darkness. I write dark stories of the future to try to prevent them from happening, to scare folk enough that they might start thinking about how the science they are doing today could make my tales of future madness look to our descendants like an amusing affectation rather then a worryingly accurate prediction.

As a science-fiction writer, I tend to worry a lot. In Citadel, my concerns turned to a future where crucial information has been lost and the risk of societal collapse is very real. The scenario is carefully ill-defined. It could be a lost colony of Earth, a territory on our home planet itself or a parallel continuum — it doesn’t matter. At some point in the past, folk with serious technological skills have seen a coming disaster — astronomical, climatic, geological — and tried to mitigate the effects by implementing smart, self-sustaining technologies to support a created culture based on the guilds, religious orders and fiefdoms of medieval Europe. Such a culture might conceivably be a better survival unit than a modern, liberal consumer society at a time of huge disruption and shortage.

In the scenario, the society — and perhaps the technology — is failing because the chain of knowledge inheritance has been broken. The hidden information system, which monitors and supports but doesn’t fully control the society, has ceased to be able to communicate effectively with the hereditary Lord and Lady who manage the community — and without this, systems are failing. Perhaps terminally.

This theme, and its potential resolution, reflects some of my concerns about the control of knowledge in our own society. It could be interpreted as a plea for open access to data, papers and other collections of fundamental value to our collective future. In a world with so many challenges, walling-up our accumulated understanding in Citadels of our own making seems unhelpful.

Citadel is a warning, but it is also a love story — albeit a dark, dystopian one.

Read more of John’s Futures stories