Idea of a Sci-Fi Novel (Patent Pending, SEW, 07/17/08)
Earth: 200-300 years from now. The impoverished survivors live in a total wasteland where anarchy abounds and food and medicine are in very short supply. There was no war, no chaos, no apocalypse, just a slow slide into poverty and famine. The wealthy took all the cures, all the food, and all the pleasure-giving things and sealed themselves away in great compounds that look like giant square-ish metal mushrooms. These impregnable cocoons become sources of anger, worship, and fear. The hero of our story leads a resistance movement that ultimately opens one of the great metal monoliths, and upon doing so discovers that the stories of the wealthy living happily inside miniature cities with food, medicines, and robots to do their bidding are all lies. The cocoon contains not but isolation chambers (advanced hospital beds) where the decrepit bodies of the wealthy are nourished through tubes (their waste recycled as food) and heroin-like drugs are fed to them steadily so that they live in a state of barely-unconscious bliss. In some cases, the wealthy have even lobotomized themselves to further the effects of their cocooned state.
The lesson is that ultimate wealth unmakes the human condition, and that money does nothing but allow you to buy your way out of living your life.
The lesson is that ultimate wealth unmakes the human condition, and that money does nothing but allow you to buy your way out of living your life.