A.E. Currie Blog

I’m doing my first book club chat this month on Utopia Five and I’m about to release a new edit. All of that has made me think back on the original idea: what if you had a computer game that simulated reality well enough to make changes in the past and see the result? How would you make something like that? For starters, you’d need a heck of a lot of data: 100% world camera coverage. Second, I decided the data would have to be public. I wanted the game invented by a person, not Google. So, I introduced an Open Panopticon in 2025 and the story takes place thirty years later.  The title of Utopia Five is a hat tip to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five - the protagonists of both can time travel in their own lifetime. Lee Sands was born the day the Panopticon was turned on and the game is a virtual time machine, which sees back to that moment and no further. I was worried I’d laid that reference on a bit thick, but nobody seemed to notice, demonstrating that authors don’t have a clue ...

My SciFi novel Utopia Five is set in 2053. It’s about a post-event society that some people consider utopian and some dystopian. Whether you live in a dystopia or not feels like it should be obvious! But is it? What is the definition? An “Event” “The Day of the Triffids” was written in 1963 by John Wyndham and the pivotal event in his book had nothing to do with carnivorous plants. In the novel, a meteor shower renders almost everyone blind and triggers the collapse of civilisation. The eponymous hostile hostas just take advantage of a situation that has abruptly shifted in their favour. The storyline is an example of a common 2-step process in dystopian fiction: - An “event” triggers the sudden breakdown of society and exposes individuals to a lot of nasty and brutish stuff. The result is usually a short life for most of the characters and a willingness to accept almost anything to fix the situation. - A new foe appears. They are intent on genocide or enslavement, contribute to the m...