Thursday, July 9, 2015

Agenda 21: The Art of Subtlety

Agenda 21, pp. 17-18

All right, we've been on Chapter One entirely too long. Let's wrap it up with some heavy-handed mother-daughter exposition:

"It wasn't always like this," she would say.

"Tell me."

"We had our own farm once. Land. Rolling hills. Green fields. We raised animals, crops. We owned property. It was ours."

"What happened to it? Where was it?"

"Far away. It was far away. Laws changed. The Authority owns all the property now."

Agenda 21 doesn't have much in the way of lore. We'll get a little more later, but this is about what you're looking at for background - odd for a cautionary tale, I know. It's not unusual for dystopian novels to be a little light on the How We Got Here part, but then most novels (even those with overt political content) are seldom named after something in the real world that led to doom in the fictional future.

On the plus side, this is where we learn about what the evil future society thinks about nature. Specifically, we learn (and I'm a little ashamed to write this) the Pledge of Animals:

I pledge allegiance to the Earth and to the sacred rights of the Earth and to the Animals of the Earth.

What, you were expecting subtlety? Glenn Beck was involved in this.



Thus ends Chapter One, and I have another audience participation number. Now that we've learned a little bit about this nature-worshipping, neo-Luddite, culturally backwards future world, I'd like you to tell me in what year you think this novel is set. Unlike the Jeremy question, this one won't have a definitive answer - the authors avoid any mention of dates, presumably to avoid the science fiction writer's curse. That being said, we will be piecing together bits and pieces in an attempt to give us a general time frame, and I'd like everyone reading to be part of that.

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