The present is a direct consequence of the past, just as the future is a direct consequence of now.
Science Fiction writers often extrapolate their story worlds from moments in the present. They're seen as prescient after the fact, when in reality they were merely commenting upon the possible outcomes of their own times.
George Orwell's 1984 is probably the best known example. He took a good, hard look at communism and said, "This is one possible future that could arise as a consequence."
Orwell was no more prescient than you or I. He could not possibly have foreseen how positively Orwellian modern society has become. 1984 was intended as a warning, not a roadmap.
The novel I'm working on now is set in a story world that's an extrapolation of a worrisome modern trend: the growing tendency in the West toward resorting to violence to effect sociopolitical change.
It began small, with a movement that emphasized kindness in speech. Suppressing words that minorities may find demeaning, for example, or shaming people who use them. It's ok to think your own thoughts, but please use another word when speaking. Let's call this first step "political correctness."
Everyone accepted PC because no one wants to be seen as unkind. We're all good people here, aren't we?
A moment later, that attitude twisted a hair into something new and a little darker. He said what? Oh, dear. I don't want to be seen in public with him. Birds of a feather and all that.
And a moment after that, a mere heartbeat, really, editors began writing letters to publishing house management, protesting contracts for wrongthink authors.
It became cool to out people on social media for not wearing a mask, or for protesting untested "vaccines"; for pushing back on the alarmism and hysteria of [insert cause of the day], or for the crime of disagreeing with a stranger in the wrong way.
Because humans are social animals and our reptilian brain is still rooted in the deep past, we complied. We conformed. We censored our speech. No one wants to be ousted from the group. That way be dragons.
A few years later and--true to the saying "if you give them an inch, they'll take a mile"--we now live in a world where a thumbs up emoji is considered rude and merely glancing at someone is a microaggression. No social transgression is too petty to punish, no struggle session too harsh, no apology ever good enough to appease the perpetually outraged pearl-clutchers demanding immediate and permanent retribution.
Out of this dystopia arose an organization that labeled itself, in proper Doublespeak, antifa. They, along with another group named using Doublespeak, engaged in "mostly peaceful protests" that, in one summer alone, claimed the lives of more than thirty people and resulted in one to two billion dollars in property damage.
Domestic terrorism became the new normal. Doxxing public officials and assassinating political enemies were standard tactics in the Social Justice War.
It must be a war, you see, for disagreeing with someone is the same thing as hitting them. Words are literally violence. Didn't you know?
I won't go any further because we all know where this has led: to a world where extremists use social media echo chambers as a way to incite riots and other violence against one's political enemies. Not opponents. Not opposition. Literal enemies. (And yes, that world also includes the overuse and misuse of the word "literally.")
When I watch the news--which, let's be honest here, I try not to do very often--I'm stunned by footage of the riots taking place across the West. Most of those riots seem to be protesting the foundations of Western civilization itself. More, they're being used as leverage to force political change.
There's a word for government by mob rule. It's called an ochlocracy and it's not where we're headed. It's where we're at.
I know, I know. This is a much more complex situation than what I've laid out.
But I'm not a historian or a political analyst. I'm a writer extrapolating from the present to the future for the purpose of story.
We live in a time of hyperconnected outrage-networks, fear-driven group behavior, and deliberately divisive news coverage (and the resultant polarization), in which a certain subset of the populace believes that it's perfectly fine to indulge in political violence as a means to an end.
I took this one aspect of our modern era, the subversion of democracy into an ochlocracy, and said, "What will the future look like if mobs rule the world?"
The result was a bleak, dark world with rolling riots, a permanent dependent class, and a thriving black market. There's one government headed by an oligarchic Ochlos Council that combined police, military, and intelligence agencies into one terrifyingly pervasive Peace Force. Anyone who can tries to get off Earth and away from Ochlos control.
I wasn't deliberately trying to create a dystopia when I began working on this story world. The story itself is a Space Opera, believe it or not, just one set in a future no one wants to live in.
The main character is a smuggler named Jupiter Skye who is a product of an Ochlos orphanage and the underbelly she slipped into as a teenager. She made it off Earth, barely, and now makes her living outwitting the Peace Force and the Russian mafiya, which managed to survive the political transition--the Great Uprising--mostly intact.
There's more to the story world, of course. Intrigue and danger and people thriving on the edges of society. It leans toward Thriller with Noir undercurrents, neither of which were intentional. But it's fun, the characters are compelling, and I'm having a blast writing it.
I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm just using the current moment as a jumping off point for building a story world. And while the story contains a lot of subtext and unspoken political commentary, this isn't message fiction.
I have little patience for that. I'd never force-feed it to readers.
Instead, I tried to build a future that feels lived in and logically consistent, where the characters feel as complex and deep as real people. There are no heroes. Everyone is a little morally gray.
At the same time, these characters have honor and loyalty. Like you and me, they're just trying to survive in a system that would rather turn them into obedient servants of the state than allow them to live freely.
The present shapes the future. Story allows writers to explore where the consequences of the present moment may lead, one character, and one adventure, at a time.
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