Writing Fiction for Social Change

I have been working on my near future sci fi universe THE MISSISSIPPI DIVIDE, and I suddenly remembered the first satirical hyperbole piece I ever wrote as a freshman in college. I was entering the Mademoiselle magazine competition for a summer internship, and I took as my inspiration the 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal” by Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). In this satirical essay, in the words of Wikipedia, “Swift suggested that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies.”

I submitted my satirical essay on the “solution” to the problems of integration in America by the simple expedient of scraping off the black “paint” of blacks (the term African-American had not yet started to be used). Thus the blacks would now be “white” and there would no longer be any problems of integration.

(And while this essay did get me to the next round of the competition, I chose to next create a 3-dimensional disco nightclub model out of cardboard and paint that did not make the next cut in the competition.)

Today the current media attention on a range of social issues requiring social change (sexual assault in the workplace, shootings in schools, hacking of supposedly secure online networks, etc.) provides ample fodder for sci fi fiction.

And connected to writing of the future is writing of the past as we need to understand the past to imagine the potential awards and punishments of the future.

I just finished reading the novel THE KITES by Romain Gary — recently translated from the French. Partway through the novel I checked that I was, in fact, reading a novel. This was because it was clear Gary was referring to real people and events during the French occupation in World War II.

When I got to translator Miranda Richmond Mouillot’s note at the end of the book, I understood. Apparently Gary considered this novel as connected to memory, which explains, for example, his praise of Pastor André Trocmé and all the villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who risked their lives to rescue and hide Jews from Nazi roundups for the extermination camps.

In the Wikipedia entry for Le Chambon-sur-Lignon I learned:

In 1990 the [French] town was one of two collectively honored as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Israel for saving Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. The other town awardee was the Dutch village of Nieuwlande.

(I quickly looked up Nieuwlande in Wikipedia, as I had never before heard of this town’s heroic efforts to save Jews from the death maw of the Nazis.)

Then I discovered in my pile of recent New Yorker issues the January 1, 2018, Adam Gopnik article “The Made-Up Man: The truth about the novelist Romain Gary.” Gopnik says about THE KITES, “What is remarkable about ‘The Kites’ is this combination of moral clarity and moral compassion.”

This “combination of moral clarity and moral compassion” may be very appropriate for writing in the science fiction realm, where concerns of the past, the present and the future are reflected in both the protagonists and antagonists (as well as for all of us in the real world).

Click here to read more about THE MISSISSIPPI DIVIDE: A Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. Phyllis is available by skype for book group discussions and may be reached at pzmiller@gmail.com

Her Kindle fiction ebooks may be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller — and her Kindle nonfiction ebooks may also be read for free with a Kindle Unlimited monthly subscription — see www.amazon.com/author/phylliszmiller