About Utopia Five (With No Spoilers!)


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 Kurt Vonnegut tribute was not the only thing readers hardly ever spot. I wanted Lee to be an easily-identified-with everygeek, so I never mention whether they’re male, female or anything else. Amazingly, no one notices that either, they just assume a gender. And it’s not men presuming Lee is male and vice versa. There’s no obvious pattern like that. So which gender is my main character? I had one in mind at the start, but now Lee’s just Lee. I don’t reckon Lee thinks about it that much and by the 2050’s it’s no big deal. 

For the game to work, I realised I’d also need great human emulation. Chatbots becoming more lifelike was plausible given all the data the Panopticon would generate. In the book's 2053, the world is still a long way off general artificial intelligence, but most people think they already have it. Perfect (Turing-test-passing) chatbots are ubiquitous and, as Phillip K Dick predicted, the difference between what is human and what merely passes for it is lost on most of the folk of Utopia Five. 

Here came another surprise for me. Lee goes to great lengths to point out that their bots are not general AIs, but a big proportion of my readers still read it as they are. Again, you have to hand it to PK Dick, he had his dystopian head screwed on. As chatbots improve in reality, anthropomorphism is something we need to be careful of.

The final question I had for the reader was: is the world of Utopia Five a dystopia or a utopia? There I was expecting a mixed response and I got it. What do I think? Like all worlds, it’s somewhere in between.


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