Writing Ecotopian Stories
Utopian fiction has a reputation for the difficulties it presents to writers and the boring stories that come out of it. Nonetheless, we still consider it a worthwhile endeavor. We might agree with Ursula Le Guin that reducing story to just conflict misses all the other dimensions of relating and changing, but does that actually get us any closer to figuring out how to write (or, for RPG players, play) a good story? Shifting our focus from “conflict” to “change” can help, but it doesn’t get us far enough. So let’s talk about what can make a good story in a neotribal, ecotopian setting like the Fifth World.
We’ve seen nonviolent communication (NVC) abused and used in quite violent ways many times, but its basic assumptions — that we all have the same basic needs, that we sometimes see no way to fulfill our needs without denying others the chance to fulfill theirs, but that we can almost always untangle those problems if we can sort through the feelings we have that arise from those needs and get down to the needs themselves — provides a framework for understanding conflict that can really help us.
In the Fifth World people don’t generally worry about food, shelter, and other basic necessities, at least not as basic necessities, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have needs. Fulfilling basic needs just means that you start focusing on other needs instead. In the RPG, we use a needs deck with four cards:
Spiritual needs like authenticity, beauty, freedom, harmony, hope, integrity, justice, presence, or purpose
Emotional needs like affection, excitement, humor, intimacy, joy, love, mourning, self-expression, and warmth
Physical needs like air, food, movement, rest, safety, sex, shelter, touch, and water
Mental needs like challenge, clarity, creativity, discovery, efficacy, learning, legacy, mastery, and understanding.
The game starts there because we feel that this really gets to the heart of good stories in the Fifth World. Stories focus on change, and we change in response to needs, so we begin with what we need. When those needs cross others’ needs, things get interesting.
When you’re playing the RPG, you might encounter someone and get to ask another player what that person wants, and that player’s very likely to put herself in that person’s shoes and give you something that might make sense, but might not present much drama or challenge. In those situations, you can add some more drama by reacting emotionally. You might have an idea already of why you react like that, or you could leave it as something to explore later. One of the game’s principles is Ask questions and build on the answers. Combine that with Word Essential’s advice on developing a protagonist’s flaws. If a place wants more sunlight, cutting some of the canopy open might not seem like such a big deal, until you mention your character’s fear of heights. Why do you fear heights? What happened to cause that fear? You can give us an answer right then and there, or you can Defer answers and then Ask questions and build on the answers.
Most stories in the Fifth World focus on family drama: you want something, but somebody else in your family opposes it. Maybe they want it, too, and you can’t share it. Or maybe they think it will hurt you, and they want to protect you. You love and respect each other, but you have different ideas of what you should do, or what the family should do. Or two different members of your family want mutually exclusive things from you. Maybe it only seems mutually exclusive. Maybe you find you really can’t reconcile them. Whether you reconcile them or have to make a choice, either way, you have the start of a good story.
People in the Fifth World consider land part of family, so family drama can includes places and other-than-human people, like animals, the dead, abstract concepts, feelings, stories — not just anything, but much more than just human beings. There you might really get into irreconcilable differences, like the wolf who wants meat and the deer who wants to live. @giuliwrites‘s short story, “Deerkin” provides an example of this kind of story.
Anger: Families in the Fifth World spend their first several years in constant skin-to-skin contact with other family members. Throughout their lives, they live in close quarters with their family. They often touch each other while talking. This closeness teaches them to pay very, very close attention to one another. People in the Fifth World have trouble lying to other members of their family. Everyone can tell. It can seem almost like telepathy to a modern observer, but it really just comes down to a lifetime of close attention. Usually, this works out well, but it makes them far more vulnerable to emotions like anger. One person’s anger can simmer through the whole family, and when it bursts, it can become a real crisis. People in the Fifth World also know when and how to give each other space to deal with this dark side of emotional connection, and the things that trigger such responses have not become any clearer or obvious than today. You can always add the threat of growing, simmering anger to create tension, just remember to Ask questions and build on the answers, and eventually get to the bottom of where that anger comes from.
Fear: People in the Fifth World have fears, both rational an irrational, just like us. Some people go out of their way to face their fears. Others live their lives always trying to avoid them. You can usually turn a calm situation into a fraught one by introducing someone’s fear.
Jealousy: Jealousy requires something scarce that two people can’t share, and the Fifth World has fewer of those, but some still remain.
Today, about 15% of the world’s cultures practice monogamy. 84% practice polygamy. Most people in the Fifth World have at least some descendants from those relatively few but quite overpopulous monogamous traditions, so monogamy might have become more popular, but polyamory will appear at least as often, and probably more often. So the standard love triangle story might not work so often. Nonetheless, most indigenous stories of strife and conflict have an act of adultery somewhere in their beginning. The key here lies in promises between individuals broken, rather than social norms. A love triangle where everyone deals openly and honestly with each other shouldn’t pose a problem. One where people act in secret to break promises to one another will always cause problems.
Then you have other ephemeral things to feel jealous about: the esteem of your family, the respect of your elders, or (perhaps at the root of both of the foregoing) your own sense of self-worth. This can prompt deeper questions, like why the jealous person feels so insecure to begin with, and how her family failed to hold her up, to leave her in this situation and fail to recognize it for so long, but there, again, you can Ask questions and build on the answers to find out.
Nature: The “Man vs. Nature” conflict takes on a different tone in an animist world, with much less distinction from “Man vs. Man” than we would usually see. Other-than-human persons have no hostility to humans. “Nature” does not show itself “red in tooth and claw.” But other-than-human persons do remain other-than-human. They do not put the needs of humans first. They place their own needs first. Predators do not generally hunt humans, except in unusual circumstances. You can add the occasional story of a displaced bear, a desperate lion, or a panther gone mad who becomes a maneater, but Ask questions and build on the answers. How did that happen? What drove the animal to such ends?
As you move further away from humans, and the persons become more and more other, you still don’t find malice, but you do find less and less concern for human well-being. A mountain can still pose an obstacle for people, and it doesn’t particularly care that it does. People in the Fifth World don’t remark on it, because it’s simply become normal for them, but the Fifth World sees many, many more storms, cyclones, and hurricanes than the present day, as part of the cataclysmic changes in the climate from now to then. The people in the Fifth World deal with those things far better than we do, but a cyclone with sustained winds over 180mph (as will generally hit once a season or so) still poses a major problem for people.
Self: Like “nature,” the “Man vs. Self” conflict also takes on a different tone in an animist world. Animists recognize as persons those things that can act socially. Anyone who’s struggled with depression should recognize its ability to speak to us, to have a relationship with us, and even to have its own relationships through us. Your spouse, your family, your closest friends, they all have their own relationships with your depression, too, if you think about it, don’t they? So, in an animist sense, depression persons, and becomes another person that you can contend with, as in “Man vs. Man.” Likewise, not only other problems and inner demons, but also your pride, your anger, your jealousy, or your fears.
Rivalry: In the Fifth World, people have no professional class to mete out violence on their behalf; no police to call, no armies to send off to war. If a family must fight a war, then the members of that family must fight it. If you feel wronged, then you yourself must set it right. Generally this helps avoid violence. Everyone knows that their own lives and the lives of their family will hang in the balance, which makes them much less eager for conflict. They usually have means of mediating conflicts, redressing wrongs, and settling disputes without turning to violence. Some families have ritualized sports to replace warfare. Others might combine the influence of traditional Irish or Inuit song duels with modern rap battles. Contests of bravery can also settle disputes.
Even so, occasionally things get out of hand. Uusually this means a bitter rivalry, either between individual or between whole families. In the context of that rivalry, the two involved escalate every slight, insult, or provocation, real or perceived, to a major issue. Usually, they’ll call upon some old tradition like a song duel/rap battle or football or game of chicken to settle the affair, at least for the moment. But sometimes things go too far, and someone gets hurt.
A cycle of attacks or even killings for revenge doesn’t happen often in the Fifth World, but it does happen sometimes. It means that the normal means for controlling a rivalry have broken down, and usually point to deeper problems. Generally, rivalries play out in less dangerous, more socially sanctioned arenas.
Some Much Less Common Problems
Starvation: Hunter-gatherers might not always have their favorite foods, but it’s hard to starve, as one Bushman put it, “when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world.” People in the Fifth World might go hungry in a bad season, but they won’t starve, so plots that start from a fear of starvation won’t really fit.
War: The Fifth World doesn’t have perfect peace, but “war” means something different to them than it does to us. The people in the Fifth World will remember wars for generations, and speak of them as a dark, terrible time filled with fear and paranoia, when you might fall victim to attack at any time. A bloody war might see the deaths of half a dozen people in a single year. Hunter-gatherers tend to move away when you pressure them, rather than fight, because they don’t have fixed points that they need to defend. Most wars in the Fifth World involve gardening families with villages and fields, which provide both targets worth raiding and points worth defending. They still lack the population to mount a major offensive or sustain significant losses.
Disease: Humans no longer live in dense population centers, and that’s made it difficult for many diseases to survive. Forced to live in healthier, more adaptive ways, the “diseases of civilization” have largely disappeared with civilization. Some diseases, even terrible ones, survive, though they’ve become more rare and isolated. With less need to treat diseases, the people of the Fifth World have a much reduced ability to treat them (though by no means none), and that makes the rare disease that does take hold all the more frightening.
Authority: Disaster communities show us that we indulge elites with hierarchy and power when things go well, but when things do not go well we can no longer afford that, and must instead revert to our natural egalitarian roots. In the Fifth World, the collapse of civilization made authority untenable, and none of the modes of survival that have worked since then have really allowed for the re-establishment of power.
Addiction: Addiction might seem like a great topic to explore, given what we said about “Man vs. Self” above, but you don’t find the opposite of addiction in sobriety, you find it in connection. You might find epidemics of addiction among indigenous people after colonialism destroys their cultures in ongoing campaigns of genocide, but you don’t find very much of it before that. Many people in the Fifth World revere entheogens, and those plants, as other-than-human persons, sometimes have agendas besides human welfare. You might have a struggle there, certainly, but it probably doesn’t involve much about addiction, per se.
The Legacy of Civilization: In this, Children of Wormwood provides a terrible example. The legacy of the old world does occasionally poke its head into the Fifth, but not often. The old world died a long time ago, and with a few remarkable exceptions, its shadow has passed. Note how in Children of Wormwood, even the other families of Pittsburgh react to the Beaver Valley People as if they bear a heinous burden. They do! Few families in the Fifth World suffer like they do. If your family has a particular reason to suffer from an ongoing legacy of civilization, then explore it, but remember that it makes that family quite unusual. Far more often, the Fifth World deals with its own problems, not the problems of the ancient past. At least, not directly.
Psychopathy: The incidence of psychopathy varies between populations, and seems to correlate with certain cultural beliefs. Andrzej Łobaczewski’s notion of political ponerology might suggest that the modern world will leave behind a legacy of more psychopaths than normal, but the end of the old world has made psychopathy disadvantageous once again. When it does occur, the people of the Fifth World often understand it in terms of their own cultural scripts, as witches or ogres. Most often, a witch or ogre who cannot control herself and participate in society faces execution, but some families have a hard time killing their kin, even kin who have committed truly monstrous crimes. They turn to exile, which creates the problem of ogres and witches who might move into another family’s territory, often living in secret, and often continuing to commit monstrous crimes. This does not happen often, though. In the RPG, it’s one possible way that one of the generational crises could play out, which will give it the appropriate rarity. Don’t add it outside of that, or you’ll have it popping up far too often.
