Shores of Night

Something I've noticed recently is that there's been a real switch away from dystopias among my roleplaying friends, and among the boards I lurk on. Common refrains about how people don't want to deal with dark subjects pop up frequently, usually with a comment about how the world's dark enough thank you very much, and there being a desire for escapism. This seems to extend into fiction, film, and other genres of media as well (though I will concede that there are a lot of people who are doubling down on the darkness). Personally, and I'm saying this now to get it out of the way, I don't find the argument and belief that fiction and stories are purely for escapism particularly believable. To me, they're about "how we live now, and how we might live in the future", to quote Jackie Gay my Fiction tutor from my MA in Creative Writing. As far as I'm concerned fiction is there to talk about the world, and explore truths that would probably b...

Social Media is, if you'll forgive the expression, like sticking your head inside an angry wasp hive and hoping you don't get stung. It sounds like it shouldn't be, but at this point in the proceedings I think we can probably all agree that though its useful (in a way that sticking your head in a wasp hive isn't), the Internet, and especially sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn, has enabled the worst aspects of our species. That's not to say that we're all unpleasant when we interact online, or that we aren't sometimes nasty in real life (though I do tend to err on the side of that being less likely than it being online). It's just that from Twitter mobs to cyber stalking to the growth of "red pill" culture, it feels like social media has enabled unpleasant views, and often disgusting behaviour. Now, I'm not actually going to say that we should wave a magic wand and get rid of this stuff: the genie's out of the bottle a...