Monday, October 8, 2012

What Dreams May Come ...

I shared my dorky fantasy at Historical Fiction Online, and got this in response:


Originally Posted by DianeL  
My great fantasy as a writer is that my work will be the dusty book some kid picks up out of boredom when he's spending a summer at some horrid old great aunt's house with nothing to do. I know the dread condition of juvenile boredom has been electronically outlawed and (theoretically) obliterated by the implantation of gaming systems into every single child's hands 24/7 since the 1990s ... but all the better for *dreaming* ...  

Originally Posted by LoveHistory
The setting: post-apocalypse. The time: 2500 AD (or CE if you want to get PC). The scene: an attic in an Indiana farmhouse.
A young boy (or girl, doesn't matter which really) is rummaging through poly-carbon storage cubes in an attempt to find something to do. Numerous small rectangular devices which no longer work in a world sans-electricity have been discarded after use as target practice. At the bottom of one cube is a rectangle of paper and ink. An ancient amusement device of unknown origin. Flipping open the archaic cover flap, the child reads the following words: this book is a work of fiction. A book! Granny used to tell stories about these things, but he/she never believed they existed. Here is proof. Now to see what magical lure they used to hold, and test whether that value could still exist in the year 2500.




Hee.

Awesome.  (It's always a boy in my head, though.  Don't know why, I guess I'm just being gender egalitarian - or maybe it's because A&V itself is told from the male POV.)

3 comments:

Mo said...

Two things. First, the Indiana farm house must belong to the Jones family, for the pleasing archaeological resonance. Also, it does not matter whether the kid is a boy or girl, because the endocrine disruptions of the 2100s rendered us all hermaphroditic, completing physically a movement away from gender specificity that had begun as a cultural movement.

Kate Warren said...

Nice additions, Mo. Love the Jones farm.

DLM said...

Y'all are killin' me and I love it. *Grin*