Okay, time to give some of our AU Earth setting writers some love. Okay, well, we have with both past exercises, as they can use some of both, but we're going to dive into the idea of just how far you're alternative setting is going to go. Let's dive in.
The first type of alternative Earth and one that people really like is taking a part of our past and twisting it. What if we never got into the second world war (Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick)? What if we never set off the nuclear bombs and we never entered the nuclear age? What if the cold war never ended? Those are a lot of more recent history changes, along with the assassination of JFK (11/23/63 by Stephen King), but that's not to say you couldn't go back farther. What if Rome never fell? What if Cleopatra never took her own life and Egyptian culture had a resurgence? We have a lot of history that, if you have a favorite time period, you could go back and twist something to write a plot from there.
The second type of alternative Earth is taking something we do not have - magic, mythological creatures, etc - and bringing them into the world. Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series has a mage detective working in Chicago. That's still the real world but it's urban fantasy due to the magic and supernatural creatures in the world. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to use the age we're in right now for your story. You could set it back in Elizabethan time and have a magic user who was in service of the Queen to take out her enemies. Or something else. You're not restricted to the time period of the here and now. Next week, we're going to be diving into different cultures and the rule of magic that will help those who want to write in this type of setting.
The third type of alternative Earth is where you go into the near or distant future. What do we have that we don't have now (flying cars anyone)? Are we still the same with slight differences if you're just going a small jump in the future? For me, as I have a novel that I'm working with the near future, is that we still have a lot of the same things. Racism isn't as prevalent as it is now and there's different types of it woven into the novel (half supernatural beings looked down upon). We still have the tech we have now but it's many numbers ahead of what we have now. Think Samsung Galaxy Note 20 instead of Note 7. So you do need to think of what we have different, what we have the same, and how long you are jumping. If you're jumping into the year 3000 or beyond, you might want to look into doing a bit of the second world setting plotting because culture will probably change a lot. We might have different beings that have evolved into living alongside humans. So keep that in mind when you're doing this type of AU Earth.
So those are the three types and the challenges and differences of each. I really like working in the third type, especially for the novel I'm writing now, but that is not to say that the second and third do not blend. None of these are set apart from each other. You can use all or none or some in each of them and come up with a great novel. Until next time, keep on plotting (and writing)!
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