You Can't Change History Without Changing Your Language (A Modern Fantasy Pitfall)

Most modern fantasy stories that you come across use the hidden world trope. From Vampire: The Masquerade to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the fantastical world was always here, but it was kept secret from your prying eyes. This allows us to show the audience a world they know, and then to bring them past the veil and into the realm of the supernatural. Part of the reason we see this trope so often is that it's what readers really expect to see... but another reason is that modern fantasy without a hidden world requires so much retooling and redesigning that it can get exhausting.

And in some cases, it no longer resembles the world we know at all. This goes all the way down to the language we use, and the pop culture references that can be made in our stories without snapping the reader out of the narrative.

And things can get conspiracy-board complicated with this.

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When You Alter History, Everything Changes

We're all familiar with the idea of the Butterfly Effect. Often used as a science fiction premise, it's when someone goes back in time, changes one thing, and then they come back to their present only to find that seemingly tiny action has resulted in massive, unanticipated changes in the present.

This is something you have to do when you remove the secret world trope from a modern fantasy story. It's also why so many stories that you see have a major supernatural event set relatively close to the present. Whether it's the revelation of the supernatural world in Trueblood, or the world-shaping alterations that occur in Shadowrun, most of the world's history played out the same way it did in our history books, with a divergent point happening somewhere in the modern era (typically in the 1980s or 1990s, though sometimes later).

But when you go back further than that, you have to change more. And you don't just have to change major world events (such as the necessity for adding necromancy to the Geneva convention if there were Nazi sorcerers raising corpses in the trenches to continue the fighting), but you also need to change the language people do and don't use.

For fantastic examples of this, check out Lindsay Ellis's video Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding.

While there are a lot of points made in that video (and you should go watch it) the one I want to hit on is a point that a lot of writers often overlook; if you change history, then you change the culture. You alter the course of events, and that should lead language to develop in different ways, or for particular touchstones to operate differently.

One of the smallest, but most deeply-rooted, examples is when Will Smith's cop character tells his neighbor, "Just crip walk your ass back over to the barbecue."

This statement, especially said by a cop, is a direct reference to the Crips, an infamous street gang. However, for this statement to make sense in-universe that means you needed to have the trans-Atlantic slave trade, leading to the Civil War in America, leading to the exodus of freed slaves from the harsh conditions of the south, leading to the building tide of social concerns that created the Black Panthers, you need the Black Panthers to be destroyed by government actions, and for the Crips to be created to fill that power vacuum. And you need all of that to happen in a world where, apparently, 2,000 years ago the 9 armies of all the various races (elves, humans, and other fantasy creatures) came together to defeat some unspecific Dark Lord.

That's stretching it, to say the least.

Now, that's not the only example we can take from Bright, whose world has fantasy creatures and magic going back even more than the 2,000 years mentioned (unless that was when all fantasy arrived on Earth's doorstep, though the film doesn't say, so we can't assume that). There's the moment Smith says, "Fairy lives don't matter today," which implies the existence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and all the historical precedent that goes into that, including the existence of all of our real-world human racism, which seems weird in a world with half a dozen other fantasy creatures added into the mix for millennia. There's also a moment where Smith yells at an orc, "So take your Shrek-looking ass back to Fiona!" This, of course, implies that somehow Grimm's fairy tales were still written in this world, that the Disney company exists, and that the specific events that led to the creation of Dreamworks still happened, and that they made Shrek in this setting, and that it still became a massive, box office hit.

Which is asking a lot from your audience in terms of believability.

You Can Do It... But Think It Through

I don't want anyone reading through all of that and thinking that it's just not worth the effort of writing modern fantasy without a masquerade, or a relatively recent divergence point. Or that's it's not even worth writing modern fantasy at all, if you have to police every reference your characters make, song they quote, or turn of phrase they use. All of that, though, is part of doing your due diligence when it comes to keeping your setting internally consistent, and minimizing the amount of times your audience asks you questions that your story isn't going to answer.

You're the one who decides your own workload.

With all of that said, though, if it sounds like too much effort to alter the real world with an older divergence point, then it might be worth taking the dramatic step of building your own modern fantasy setting; one that isn't on Earth at all. Especially because this can let you make echoing references, where you have something that is in-context of the setting you've made, but which feels like a reflection of a similar piece of media, turn of phrase, etc., from our real world. For example, replacing the phrase, "Don't take any wooden nickels," with, "Don't take any brass tacks," could refer, in-world, to a name for a coin that's no longer in distribution (a brass tack) from a country your nation was once at war with, and so their currency wasn't accepted (or was considered a sign that you're a sympathizer for their cause) long enough that this became part of the lexicon. Alternatively, if the coins are outdated and no longer in circulation, they might be only used by criminal elements, making them a crime to hold, even if they're valuable in a certain part of society. This would also allow the phrase, "Let's get down to brass tacks," to also be co-opted, as you're discussing a serious, sensitive matter that is not to leave this room.

Just as an example.

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Some Tips on Writing Dystopian Societies

For reasons I cannot explain it appears that dystopian futures are big right now... really big. The young adult genre (which isn't really a genre, but more on that another day) seems to have a particular hard-on for them of late, with The Hunger Games and Divergent as two stand outs in the sales categories. If you're thinking about writing your own bleak, Nihilistic romp through a crumbling, amoral wasteland though it's important for you to stop and take a deep breath.

Just because everyone else is jumping off a bridge doesn't mean you should too. In the event that it's a really kick-ass bridge though, make sure you know the best way to stick the landing.

Tip #1: Understand What Happened

The term dystopia was coined in 1868, and it is a term based on Greek that means "imaginary bad place." As a genre dystopian works are characterized by societies filled with hardship, deprivation, oppression, a low quality of life, and constant terror. If you're writing about events in a society like this, then it's your job to explain to us just how the hell it got that way.

And then the penguin masters took their rightful places...

Societies are organic things made up of the people who populate them. Every society from post-apocalyptic tribes of violent mutants to crumbling cities filled with the repressed populace of downtrodden workers has reached its current existence through logical forces. Every civilization that's formed on this planet (and probably on other planets too) so far happened because of human forces, and the evolution of society into a dystopia needs to come with equally sensical events.

For example, did society collapse under the weight of a corrupt, wealthy upper class? If so, did this lead to the formation of a communal society where ambition, individuality, and even attachment to material possessions are seen as crimes? Alternatively did the wealthy and privileged form an oligarchy, buying their way into politics, media, and law enforcement so they can continue to maintain their positions of power while abusing the lower classes, the planet, and the resources available to the society? Or did something cataclysmic occur, leading the frightened masses to turn over power and liberty to the clergy, who now rule with an iron fist over all aspects of a sectarian society?

These are all valid examples, and they all have an inciting event, a reaction, and a change. Your society is a character, and the first step to developing it is to know what led to it becoming the way it is now.

Tip #2: Look at Real Life Examples

Contrary to popular belief dystopian societies exist in places other than between book covers, and on the silver screen. As a writer you should look at what happened in the real world to see if what you're portraying on the page can measure up.

Nero's decree against pants was really the beginning of the end.

Let's take one of the biggest dystopias I can think of; Rome. Rome began life as a city state like any other, and due to its advances in science, military training, culture and law it devoured huge chunks of the known world. Rome grew, and at some point its ideals began to fade. It grew corrupt and darker, with the great games to distract the upset populace as the government served the ends of the wealthy rather than its citizens. It eventually toppled due to outside forces who sacked Rome and took all she had to offer.

History is filled with other examples of dystopian societies. Sparta is a good example; an entire nation where the upper class trained from childhood to become the ultimate warriors in the world, and where all the work was done by a slave underclass who had no rights and who could often be killed out of hand. The cult in Jonestown who eventually committed suicide set up a miniature society to follow the religious whims of its leader, up to and including drinking poisoned kool aid. The rise of the United Soviet Socialist Republic, which was characterized by oppression, brutality, and violent destruction of anything that challenged the status quo. Arguments could even be made for how Iran and Afghanistan transformed from relatively progressive democracies into religious theocracies in a few decades thanks to the meddling of the world's superpowers putting brutal dictators in power because they were allies.

If you study how societies go from pretty good to totally screwed in the real world then your dystopia is going to feel like somewhere out of a news broadcast rather than a fantasy.

Tip #3: What's Keeping it From Toppling?

Being in a dystopia sucks. Everything is gritty and grainy, the work is back-breaking, there's no healthcare, and as soon as you find anything you can take pleasure in there's a good chance it will be crushed under the boot heel of the government. The many are being regularly trodden underfoot because of a few people who have managed to rig the system that way.

So what is keeping the whole thing from tumbling down like a pack of cards?

This. Mostly this.

In order for a dystopia to exist, and for it to have existed for longer than a few years, you need to know what makes it tick. There's got to be some glue holding the whole fucked-up place together, otherwise it would have crumbled a long time ago and the people who were left would have built something new. Most of the time the collapse of the dystopian society is what the work is about, but not always. Sometimes there's just so much Nihilism that despite the struggles of the cast the whole, horrible clock just keeps on ticking away.

This is one of the hardest things to do, so I'll give you some examples of people who've done it before. In the film Equilibrium all the people left after the third world war agree to form themselves into a new society, and to dose themselves with an emotion-repressing drug called Prozium. Emotions have been outlawed, and those on the dose don't realize how terrible this is. In this case the only thing holding the society together is the law enforcement arm called the Grammaton Cleric and Prozium; once the drug disappears the whole population begins to wake up and the basic building block of the society crumbles.

In The Running Man the world has become a dystopian oligarchy where there are no safety regulations, no unions, no environmental regulation, and the wealthy and privileged can do whatever they want. The lower classes are held in check by a combination of jack-booted thugs, and the free entertainment beamed into every home via television. The Free Vee not only distracts the working class from how badly they're being abused, but it provides them with a dream; a dream that they too could get on TV and better themselves by winning one of the games where victory means millions. If that dream is ended, as Ben Richards predicts it will be, the poor will rise up and tear the wealthy down off their thrones and take over the society that they really helped build in the first place.

Lastly, let's take a look at Fahrenheit 451. In this world firemen are actually called to locations where people are hoarding books, and it's their job to burn them down. The society is based on ignorance, and on a populace who does their jobs without question. Everyone is too distracted by the perks of technology to question what the government is doing, or to ask why books are being burned. When our hero starts reading he has to escape, and when that society is bombed into dust by its enemies he and others like him have the accumulated knowledge of memorized texts that they'll be able to use to build a new, better society.

Tip #4 Follow the Ripples

This rule typically applies to writing alternative history, but dystopian futures can benefit from it just as well. Every choice made has an effect in a society, and the bigger the society the bigger those ripples become. Say your dystopian society claimed that all unmarried women have no rights (because The Handmaid's Tale is still pretty goddamn scary). Would that lead to people taking elaborate precautions to have more sons? Would a new industry arise to buy unwanted daughters from their parents? Would rich families who loved their daughters create trusts, managed by men, so that they would be cared for after the parents passed?

Who knows what would happen? You need to in order for your world to make sense. If there's a logic hole, or something exists even despite the fact that it shouldn't (a female lead in a world like this where she aggressively back talks men in public with no repercussions, for example, would be completely against the culture you've created) your reader is going to notice. For every decision you need to ask why? When you've run out of why's, then you have a solid stage to play out your drama on. Whatever it happens to be.


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