Other perspectives

Speculative fiction doesn’t have to be dystopian

Speculative fiction takes place on this earth in the future. The setting is often a postapocalyptic dystopia, because many of us today see some sort of apocalypse coming.

But is it inevitable? No one knows. Fiction is free to speculate that it never arrives, and even to imagine a utopian future for the earth.

Clementa takes place in an environmental utopia—an ecotopia. It’s a reforested world where all the animals run wild and humans live in small, economically self-sufficient, culturally diverse homelands.

One of these homelands, however, while just as ecotopian as all the others, is dystopian for women. There, women have been oppressed for generations.

What would it take to awaken them to their rage? How could they, barehanded, fight the well-armed men? Clementa tells the story.

Adventures in ecotopia

A lot has happened on Earth between now and 2361, when Ernest of Dezrett goes roaming with a band of Utes. Earth’s forests have grown back, its plants and animals gone wild. Nature is flourishing—and so is humankind, its genius expressed in numerous local cultures and a vibrant cosmopolis.

Agriculture has been abandoned. Money has been forgotten.

Or so we gather, as Ernest, the lead narrator in Clementa, recounts his adventures. He’s writing for his contemporaries, not for us, so he doesn’t need to tell them what they already know; but we see their world and infer how it got to be that way.

All along, though, the story’s the thing. It’s a first-hand account of how the oppressed women in one secluded homeland rise in rebellion. We come to know several characters well, both oppressed and oppressors, as they blunder and prevail, wound and heal, kill and love in this epic struggle for—and against—liberation.