this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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I've got a wip pulp fantasy book about socialism that I keep getting stuck on. I'm not entirely sure why, I think in part it's because I have a complete story arc but need to rework chunks. I write best when I'm not totally sure what's going to happen.
I'm also starting some work on a couple YA books for my kids, one is post-apocalyptic and one is hard science fiction. Both are promising but it will depend on how much the kids engage with them, I'll only continue if my audience is enjoying it.
I'd love to know more about the fantasy book about socialism. What's going in?
I haven't got a great elevator pitch for it yet but essentially there are a number of different ways to do magic, split by culture. I've passed it through a number of filters to keep it from being too much of an anvil, but several of the forms of magic are stands-in for the labour theory of value. Magicians can become very powerful by effectively stealing and monopolizing magic from a larger group of people, or they can be individually quite weak but collectively strong. The 'socialist' magicians have learned that they can compete a bit with the stronger magicians by collectively agreeing on someone to share their magic with, but it's hard to keep a power structure like that when all around them are people trying to steal all their magic.
This stuff is all a backdrop to a story that's a more standard adventure journey, but those themes do recurrently crop up and will eventually be core to some of the conflict
Gotcha. I had an image in mind of a fantasy society trying to replace their monarchy with a socialist system of governance, but your idea sounds interesting, too.
There's an element of that to it. The overarching villain represents a hostile monopolistic corpo in the analogy, and a continent-spanning emperor in the text, and "socialism" is going to be needed to defeat him.
How far along are you? In the concept development stage? I'm working on the individual stories that are making up my current project, and it's not easy. Was struggling with burnout for a few months and am now trying to get back into it.
I've written an entire book, but I'm not happy with some of the structure and am redoing a few big chunks. It's meant to be a trilogy, and as I get into book two I'm a bit hampered by the things I'm not happy with in book 1.