i was thinking about writing a novel now that im retired. i became uninterested in fiction completely about ten years ago. i just cant bring myself to care about something that didnt happen. it inevitably ends up being about people having sex or some kind of love triangle. no matter what novel, no matter how austere or dignified, if it was published in the past ten years then it uses some kind of visceral limbic-system mind bait. its some semi-interesting sci-fi with a whole lot of click bait slathered on top. even red mars, one of the only fictional books i like, has this problem.

but fiction can be worth it when its laying out ideas that are so new and so fresh that it is intrinsically valuable. but these grand visions dont involve people or relationships at their core, so making a book out of it can be difficult.

i think the next great sci-fi novel will be about mars. i feel like there are a lot of aspects of mars colonization that have not been picked up by the hive-mind yet. practical aspects of living there and moving things there. and generally applying the rules of today to that world. the arbitrage is in the fact that people usually paint the future with a utopian, optimistic brush but the same rules of economics and politics will apply on mars just as much as they do here. maybe that sounds like red mars but it would be different.