proposal: unaging humans that don’t have an ongoing population crisis – instead, norms approach “spend at least 50 years learning who you are and getting settled” and “a child really needs several parents who all have stable relationships with each other, at least two of whom are willing to do full-time parenting, at least in the early years”, and nobody who would have had children because “well, if I don’t have them now I can’t have them later” or an interest in perpetuating the bloodline or an interest in support in old age has kids
additionally, the lower rate of childbirth fails to prevent children from socializing, because of denser housing and better transit, so even if everyone in the city only has a thousand kids they can all meet up, or people temporarily moving to raise kids, or whatever
“but this would make boring science fiction” just have the kid-friendly cities be oversurveilled suburbia that children are weirded out by and teenagers hate. or, like, some kind of extended metaphor where a “working parent and nonworking parent” household has as much trouble raising kids as a single-working-parent household does today, or something.
anyway, since everyone uses science fiction as an oracle now apparently, we should be a tiny bit concerned about the total unavailability of a concept in sci-fi.
Or, the central conflict actually has nothing to do with the kids and how they’re being raised; rather, the kids’ situation in the world is a background to the existing story.
When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a story that took place in a dystopia where they had rejiggered human sleep/wake cycles to give everyone more waking time, and then forced children to spend half that time in school and half that time working for a war effort, which was kind of a “we have always been at war with Oceania” kind of war effort. Except that wasn’t what the story was about. The story was about three kids who find a treehouse that contains gateways to other dimensions, where they go to escape their miserable lives in the dystopia.
You could have a story about a future where humans have incredibly lengthened lifespans and there aren’t many kids and the kids that there are tend to live in specific kid-friendly places so the story is about a kid whose parents take them traveling a lot so they’re used to being in places for adults and then they move in with a more stable unit because they think the kid needs stability and the kid is bored shitless by other kids and “kid friendly” stuff. Or the kid is neurodivergent in a world that’s a lot more accepting of adult neurodivergence than child neurodivergence because kids are so much rarer than before. Or the family dynamics when your older brother is 40 and you’re 10. Or something totally unrelated, like the kid’s emotional reactions to one of the parents having a dangerous job. The conflict doesn’t have to be about the existence of the longer lifespans and the relative rarity of children but they are raised in places where children are denser than in other areas; you can follow through extrapolations of that to think, what kind of challenges would they have? Or come up with something barely related. Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom” gives us a post-humanist world where people back themselves up and death isn’t permanent and currency is popularity and reputation, and then writes a murder mystery set in that world where the main character is trying to solve his own murder after being restored from backup. The conflict isn’t about being in a post-humanist society where death is a minor inconvenience, but the story couldn’t exist without that background.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #death tw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 
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