With this other story I'm writing (I usually bounce between three at a time as ideas occur), I've tried to do a slightly different take on the old rebels vs big establishment trope. The setting is a futuristic sci-fi story in which the MC, who wakes up with complete amnesia, ends up getting sucked into a rebellion against the government. The basic premise is that the government of the largest city, which doesn't control the whole continent, has recently started rolling out the military and conquering the smaller towns and cities that won't submit to them. The rebellion was started because the government is subverting democracy in the towns and declaring martial law. However it's not because they're just out to stomp on the little guy. In the futuristic setting the Earth has been ravaged to the point the biosphere is dying and taking both plants and animals with it. The reason for the conquests is because the government needs to pool resources to try to reverse the damage before Earth completely loses the ability to support life. The rebellion on the other hand has done a good job of spreading propaganda to make them out to be big evil jackboot thugs. Opinions?
A single city, even if it’s steadily swallowing smaller cities, doesn’t seem all that likely to save the planet. Is there some reason that makes success likely? Without it, we’re pretty much back to thugs.
Interesting concept where really, there are no bad guy or perhaps that the "bad guy" is the ones helping the main character. Sounds very interesting and looking forwards to seeing more of it. That said, why is the government only doing something now? Has had this rebellion been going for years or did it just start now? Either way: why? The concepts seems fine and clear, except the reasons as to why it is happening now. Perhaps you just have not included them, but it may prove relevant to your story or plot or characters. Maybe this government is repairing the biosphere at the expense of others?
In addition to @ChickenFreak Post, which I completely agree to. Why is there only one left? Is this city somehow special and survived whatever destroyed other cities?
@ChickenFreak: The continent the city in question is on, isn't the only large city in the world and others are trying to address the problem. However the focus of the story is this one particular continent and the problems besetting it. @Necronox: In the past, before the story starts, the government was addressing the problem, and using atmospheric recyclers as a stopgap measure. Their main problem up to the point was identifying the source of what was killing the biosphere. As to the rebellion, it lasted for a decade before the story started, about three years after the conquests started.
Most colonizing powers have had some excuse for their actions. It would be a very, very hard sell for me to accept this excuse.
Take a look at The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. It has a similar theme, although the government/Chinese corporation is the baddy, what it's doing is more ecologically sustainable than what the small cities are continuing to do.
Conquering and holding an unwilling population requires a REALLY big justification. What's the justification? Yes, the biosphere is in trouble, but is that going to be fixed by conquering another city?
I like the idea, but the culture around it might make it hard. When you says "Rebels and Government" in a sci-fi story, people automatically want the rebels to win. They might just default to believing the rebel's propaganda spread, even once it becomes clear it's false. Instead of them realizing "Oh, the rebels are the bad guys." They might interpret it as, "Oh, so the government already has a lie ready for when this got out." or something of the sort. Also, if they rebels have already spread the propaganda, and did a good job, then how is the government still expanding? Aren't the other smaller cities against them now?
You bring up some good points. As is often the case, the people living in the big city believe their government, while the smaller cities believe the rebels side of things. Also, the government does eventually meet tougher resistance because the smaller cities are starting to band together for mutual protection.
I still think that it's important to know the exact details of how the invading power (I wouldn't really call it a government, outside the original city where it started; I would say that this is a story of rebellion versus rebellion) plans to save the world, and how conquering helpless populations is going to guarantee the success of that goal.
He explained, It works enough I guess but my suggestion would be that this city-state thing that's invading everyone else would want to force the other human societies to stop using things like fossil fuels and other industrial pollutants and instead return to working mostly by hand or by using harder to maintain natural resources (along with all the problems that come with crap like solar energy). The other human societies are just trying to grow their crops and live somewhat comfortable lives while largely ignoring the dying planet, where this government is saying "No, start saving the earth or else we invade and force you to do it," even though this invading force is obviously consuming massive amounts of oil and other things like that to fight a crusade against, you know, oil and other things like that. The invaded would obviously be pretty upset that this foreign force is making them rake dirt with sticks instead of driving in cars, so at first glance it seems this invading government is being an asshole to everyone else only for it to be revealed that it's a 'for your own good' initiative. Have Pocahontas sing a song or something for the kiddies and you have a decent premise, I think.
So what does the rebellion want to accomplish? If the government is saving the biosphere and the rebels are against that, then the rebels want to destroy the biosphere. But why?
It's not that the rebels want to destroy the biosphere, they're more focused on not being conquered. As is often the case people can be spectacularly shortsighted.
Not wanting to be a prisoner of foreign conquerers doesn't strike me as even slightly shortsighted, much less spectactularly shortsighted. Edited to add: None of this means that the premise is unlikely--conquerers have conjured up all sorts of reasons for wanting to take power. This reason is reasonably plausible. And it might have the advantage of actually being true--maybe killing people and taking over their cities will reduce the damage to the biosphere. But if the narrative voice thinks that the people in those cities should say, "You killed lots of our military and some of our civilians? We're under martial law and will be for the foreseeable future, but it's all OK because you pointed to this science here? You're going to have detailed, military-enforced involvement in our day-to-day affairs to see that we're not doing the stuff that YOU think hurts the biosphere? Doing stuff that we've always done will be punishable by criminal penalty or maybe by death? That's SO great! Maybe you should also take our children hostage and have public executions? All hail the conquerers!" that's going to strip away the plausibility.
One thing I think I've done is a spectacular job of not explaining the premise well enough, so I'll try again. The problem with the biosphere in the story is something everyone is looking into, big and small, but it isn't until the story starts that the problem is pinpointed. One of the other main problems in the situation is resources. The big city didn't just roll out the troops and start stomping either. They tried for many years to get the smaller powers to join them diplomatically. 'Hey, come join our club, let's work together.' They even tried to show scientific evidence of how bad the situation was. However there were naturally those who didn't believe, and others who hired 'experts' to refute the evidence saying it wasn't all doom and gloom (which it is close to in reality). It wasn't all military either, some of the smaller powers did join willingly and thus no soldiers were involved, but most didn't. As the situation got worse the big city along with their few allies didn't have the resources to address the situation, because most of the city's resources were funneled into critical infrastructure to keep people clothed, fed, housed, etc. Their top scientists did determine that if everyone worked together and pooled their resources, then once the problem was addressed and the progressive damage halted, they could begin terraforming Earth to reverse the damage. Thus the big city tried one more time to explain the situation and extended a hand of co-operation, but only about 2-3 others joined. As a result they decided military force was the only option left to them. The reason the big city dismantled the local government, they didn't dissolve political bodies, they just fired all the locals and put their people in place, and declared martial law was to deal with hostile locals after they were conquered. It wasn't to grind the little guy under heel. They would help the smaller cities they took by force with problems like food storages, medical problems, protect them from outside attack, things like that. The rebellion started as a result of these military campaigns from people who lost family and friends in the fighting, and others who genuinely didn't believe the situation with the planet was as bad as the big city said. They saw it as warmongering and expansion at their expense. Couple this with rebel propaganda, and a few incidents of field commanders handling situations with hostile locals poorly (people died), and you've got a political firestorm on your hands. Big evil jackboot thugs crushing the innocent little guy for their own gain, things like that. While this is the premise, obviously there are other problems and plots in the story as well that can also serve to distract people from the planetary situation. When you've got soldiers trying to hunt you down as a criminal, you're probably not going to be focusing on saving the planet. Plus the subjugated towns often have their hands full dealing with the new big city administration, because as one can imagine things rarely go smoothly. You got some scientists saying the end is nigh, others saying they're full of crap, military campaigns, rebellions, political upheavals, basically it's one big snarl of problem on multiple levels. Does that explain things any better?
Not yet for me, no. For me as a reader to support this "ends justify the means" scenario, I would need to accept not only that the "ends" were emergency-level vital, but that the "means" were likely--EXTREMELY likely--to solve the problem. You've got a whole planet here. Conquering a few little cities is not going to solve the problem, right? It's essentially a symbolic action. Example: We've been told that methane from cows damages the ozone layer. Imagine that I go out to some dairy farm, kill all the cows, and hold the farmer and his family prisoner so that they can't go get more cows. If I'm a character in a book, should the reader be cheering me on?
I don't see what's so outlandish about this. You have a bunch of loose states inhabited by powerful local families that have prospered off of immoral and damaging activities (in this care destroying the environment) for generations. A visionary and powerful centralized government wants it to stop. The selfish southern families, who only care about their own prosperity, and not humanity, cry that their freedom is being attacked and convince their neighbors to rebel with them.
With the Civil War, it's reasonable to say that every single slave freed is an "end" that is worth a great deal. Now, we could argue about whether the Civil War was about ending slavery, but that's drifting further into the analogy and further away from the proposed book. I'm not yet seeing that the invading power is achieving anything beyond a purely symbolic goal. If they are truly achieving something, that IMO would take this book from the reader being wholeheartedly on the rebels' side, to the reader being uncertain.
I don't know if saving the biosphere has become a popular theme in modern sci fi or not. I hope it has, as I've read that our disappearing biosphere may be even more of a threat than global warming. I think, clearly, the OP has some fleshing out to do. But if he can convince his readers that the underlying issue is a dying biosphere, and that the futuristic government is taking over in the name of saving it (it's true intentions are up to the OP), and that the rebels are too shortsighted to care about anything other than their own independence, he has a compelling story.
Am I the only one who sees a difference between symbolic action and actual action? Killing people "in the name of" something, if killing them does not accomplish the something, is NOT a good thing in my eyes. Someone who wants to stop that purely symbolic killing is NOT shortsighted in my eyes. Edit to add: Would you be totally in favor of killing the cows and imprisoning the farmer and his family? Not as government action resulting from a properly written law, but just as a private action in the cause of reducing methane? Or if we want to look at government action, totally in favor of Canada sending military teams to the US to kill cows and imprison farmers in their basements?
I don't think the issue in the OP's story is going to be black and white. What the protagonist decides will make it interesting.
If it's not supposed to be black and white, then there's no issue. My impression was that the OP absolutely wanted the reader to take the conquerer's side. I'm pretty confident that I would wholeheartedly take the rebels' side.
Exactly. I don't think this is the sort of thing that will yield a unanimous answer. He's talking about a real future problem combined with historical based power dynamics. It's not lord of the rings.
