What "Hard Dystopian Science Fiction" Means Here

The footer of every page on this site says the same thing about The Shadows Series: hard dystopian science fiction.

Labels like that get used so often they stop meaning much. So I want to take this one apart, a word at a time, and say what each piece is meant to promise you as a reader.

I'll stick to what's already on the public pages for Book One, Shadows of the Forgotten. No spoilers, and nothing about how anything ends.

"Science fiction": the question comes from technology

Start with the last two words, because they're the base.

Science fiction, the way I use it, is a story where the central question comes from something people built. Not gadgets for decoration. A question that only exists because the technology does.

In Book One, the book page opens its description with that question: "In a world where AI reigns and freedom is a whisper." The book page says AI. On this blog I use SI, Super Intelligence, for the same idea.

The company in charge, Techno-Synth, owns the city. The themes on the page include erased memory and, in the page's own words, "AI totalitarianism."

You could set a story about memory and control almost anywhere. What makes this one science fiction is the thing doing the controlling. The about page puts it as "an intelligence you cannot see."

"Dystopian": the bad future has already arrived

A dystopia is a society that has gone wrong, usually while saying it's going right.

That second part matters to me. A ruin on its own isn't a dystopia. A dystopia has a story it tells about itself.

In Shadows of the Forgotten, that story fits in three words. The book page says Techno-Synth "still promises unity, safety, order." In the same breath, it says the billboards still lie.

The other thing the word promises is timing. You aren't watching the fall. You're arriving after it. The page describes "a ruined skyline" and a resistance "hiding in the bones of the old world." The city in this story has already lost. The question isn't how to stop it. It's what a person does next.

"Hard": the costs are real

This is the word doing the most work, and the one people read in different ways.

In science fiction, "hard" often means the science is worked out with care. That's a fair thing to bring to any book with the label. But when I put "hard" in front of "dystopian," I also mean it the way people talk about a hard winter or a hard road.

When the first book came out, I said I wrote it for readers who want "their science fiction hard, their characters scarred, and their rebellions expensive." That's still the promise.

The book page says it in three short sentences: "The price of rebellion is high. Trust is scarce. Every shadow holds a secret, and every secret is a weapon."

So "hard" means choices cost something, and the bill comes due.

What it doesn't mean is dark for the sake of dark. Hard and hopeless are different words. I wrote more about that in Where Hope Lives in a Hard Dystopia: https://johndclay.com/blog/where-hope-lives

Put together

Taken together, the label makes three promises.

• The central question comes from technology: an intelligence that rules.
• The world has already gone wrong, and it explains itself in friendly words.
• The people in it pay real prices for what they choose.

The about page says it in one line. The Shadows Series is "hard dystopian science fiction about what happens when an intelligence you cannot see decides who you are allowed to be."

What the label can't tell you

A genre label is a rough map. It tells you the weather, not the people.

It doesn't tell you that the story starts small, with one man waking on cold pavement with "nothing that belongs to him." It doesn't tell you about Mia Turner, "fierce, precise, and already hunted," or about Knox, waiting in the Outlands. It doesn't tell you that found family is one of the book's themes.

Those are the parts a label leaves out, and they're the parts I care about most. The label gets you to the door. The people are why you'd stay.

The about page also names the neighbors. The work "sits in the collision of cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic thriller, and old-fashioned rebellion stories." If any of those are already on your shelf, this label is pointing your way.

Why use a label at all

Fair question. Labels can box a book in.

They also help the right reader find it, and help the wrong reader skip it without losing an evening. If you want a light read where nothing costs much, this isn't it, and I'd rather say so up front.

If you want a story about memory, identity, and the cost of resistance, the label is trying to tell you that you've found one.

A label is also a promise I can be held to. If you read the book and it doesn't feel hard, or the world doesn't feel like it has already gone wrong, that's fair to tell me. The contact page is open: https://johndclay.com/contact

The short version

Science fiction: the question comes from technology. Dystopian: the world has already gone wrong and calls it order. Hard: the choices cost something real.

That's what the three words promise. The book is where you find out whether it keeps them.

If that sounds like your kind of story, the book page has the full description, the formats, and where it sits in the series: https://johndclay.com/books/shadows-of-the-forgotten