There’s an Eagles song (and album) called “Long Road out of Eden,” and the song starts with a vivid visual that always makes me want to write a story about someone on the outside of a carefully curated technological utopia in the desert. Except that it’s not really a utopia; more like a gilded dystopia, and someone decides to escape because it’s too conformist, and they end up being exiled, and it’s a whole story that I’ll probably never write because there are way too many stories about science fiction dystopias and the minor new spin I would add to it isn’t enough to make the story work in my head.
That’s not how this story began, though. It’s how the final iteration of this story began, but I made a lot of false starts on my story for the “Fool’s Errand” prompt before landing on this halfway attempt at a utopia story. I tried writing about a homemaker trying to keep his irresponsible, genius friends safe (the home was everything from a conventional house to an advanced, self-sustaining dirigible to a space station). I tried writing about a Jules Verne style adventure story set in the modern day to explore an “unexplored island” that is just a rock in the Pacific that no one has ever visited because it’s really just a rock. I tried writing about an engineer who wants to pursue manned space exploration when everyone around her thinks that robotic exploration is far superior in every way. There’s probably three thousand words of failed stories behind the seventeen-hundred-word story that is Finding Eden.
As I was struggling with this story, I kept coming back to the false start fake utopia story mentioned in the first paragraph, and that got me thinking about the concept of utopia. I’ve read Dante’s Paradisio, by far the most impenetrable part of his Divine Comedy, and I thought the first circle of the Inferno sounded more like paradise to my mind. I’ve read Walden Two, a serious treatment of an attempt to create a human, mortal utopia, and found it wanting. From history, to mythology, to story, to science, there are attempts to create, or merely describe, utopia, and they all seem to fall short. These ideas all went into my attempts to create a true utopia for that “Long Road out of Eden” story, and I began to think that creating a true utopia is a true fool’s errand, a genuinely impossible task. That was when I had the thought to write a utopia story for the “Fool’s Errand” prompt.
There was a major problem, though: I couldn’t show the utopia. Even the not-quite utopia Finding Eden features is too perfect to convey adequately and convincingly, especially not in two thousand words, and the attempt would only distract from the story I’m trying to tell. That left me to attempt to convey it without every showing it, by implication and symbolism, but the first draft was so vague that my test reader didn’t even know the whole story was taking place in a utopia until the very end. The final draft is better, but I still worry that it won’t be clear enough to a reader who isn’t expecting it.
If ever there were an example of “iceberg style” worldbuilding, it is this story. I’m writing a whole separate post dedicated to discussing the ideas and considerations of utopias that went into this story that never directly shows the supposed utopia. In that sense, this might be one of the “artsiest” stories I’ve ever written. I actually tried to invoke real world symbolism, to play into readers’ preconceived notions, because I know the only way this would work is if the focus is very, very tight on the narrative. Oh, and I needed to cover an entire lifespan within the usual two-thousand-word limit.
At the core of the story, the central argument, is the thought that even if you manage to solve all of the other problems of a utopia, the utopia’s residents will struggle with purpose. The natural human drive for improvement, the impulse of curiosity and the fire of imagination, will make people want to leave an otherwise perfect place, simple to know what’s out there. Thus, the title. Our protagonist grows up in a nearly perfect utopia, and even so, it’s not until the end that she can begin her journey to find paradise. Even if that journey eventually brings her back to where she started, it is through the journey that she will find “Eden.”
See? It’s an “artsy” story. It’s a weird story, and I don’t really know if it works in the way I want it to, though I’d like to think it’s close. The reveal of the warden’s name at the end was supposed to be a great moment, until I found out that the angel set to guard the Garden of Eden in Genesis wasn’t a named character (I blame Moses not having an Excel document to track all of his character names). Then I had to dig through other mythic traditions, and it just didn’t work as well. Still, that’s a relatively minor concern, and I don’t think it’s what makes or breaks this story.
Really, what will make or break this story is what you think about utopia. It’s a story that requires a lot from the reader, the sort of story that will work in some people’s heads, and not in other’s. It works in mine, but I know everything that went into it. I know the whole iceberg, and you only get to see the very tiniest tip. Then again, maybe that makes it stronger. There’s one way to find out, so I hope that you give Finding Eden a try.
The creek running out of paradise burbled and tumbled between grassy hillocks with rabbits bounding through the dusty azure flowers. It gleamed in the warm, spring sunlight glancing down out of a sky with that pure blue so intense it was almost painful to look upon, setting the scene for the freckled girl in pigtails running along the bank, startling the rabbits, and setting early dragonflies and speckled finches fluttering away from her passage towards the valley’s mouth.
Aspens fluttered baby leaves in the breeze at her as she passed. Near the end of her valley home, the creek turned sharply aside, and the mountains cut into the rising sun to cast a shadow that elicited a shiver, but Zala kept running. She’d never run this far before. All she knew outside the valley were stories from her great-grandmother, and the bare facts she was taught in school.
A faint trail guided her footfalls, which puzzled her, since no one came this way. There was no reason to leave the valley’s sanctuary, but the trail remained, thin but defined. Speeding along the gentle slope, she rounded a pile of boulders waving mossy tendrils in the breeze.
“I’d not go that way, were I you.”
Click here to read the rest of Finding Eden
IGC Publishing 