Pardon me while I once again address politics. Not that they're the focus of this entry…or maybe they are.
If you've been awake, you've noticed that the Constitution keeps getting trampled on, laws broken, arbitrary edicts issued. Meanwhile I'm trying to keep my focus on writing stories. Only I worry about the settings.
Can a benevolent government feel plausible to readers? Will they be able to suspend sufficient belief? Or will they shake their heads the same as they would if you had people saying "Prithee" and "Yes m'lud" without any explanation?
Or let me put it this way. As much as I love winter, and find bleak expanses of snow good backdrops for the stories I want to tell, I worry that those backdrops are making my novels dated. With global warming, how believable will readers a decade from now find winter scenes? (That assumes, of course, that anyone is reading anything ten years from now.)
So stories with responsible governments, in places where propaganda isn't rife, where voters are informed and don't cast ballots without educating themselves, how plausible are those?
Because whether a writer addresses politics directly or not, all story choices are political. Do the female characters always get the last word? A strong female character is a political choice. Are the men's decisions always right? That's political too. So is inclusion or omission of trans people or non-white ones. Likewise relationships that aren't exclusively heterosexual. Not to mention bigger issues, like what kind of relationship is healthy, which kinds of decisions are moral.
So my apologies if my latest works aren't as escapist as you would like them to be—or I would either. But as I said, story choices have political elements to them.
So, to that extent, there is no escape.
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