Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36585
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I’m a little confused by your question and it may be worth providing more information if you want more answers, but these are my initial thoughts:

As per the link that @J.G. has provided suggests, futuristic fiction is set apart by its distinctive setting. If your future is exactly the same as the present day, surely, the only thing you are changing is the date and therefore you aren’t really writing about the future at all. It certainly won’t present any struggles in terms of dreaming up a possible future if nothing’s changed.

But, I think you may have an issue with believability. While you can write anything that isn’t remotely plausible, it still has to be believable otherwise you will lose the trust of your readers. On the flip side you can write something entirely plausible but if it isn’t presented in a believable way, readers don’t even buy what’s possible.

If you think about how things have changed in the last 25 years, not necessarily in terms of new inventions but inventions becoming more accessible and prolific: drones, smartphones, electric cars, DNA profiling, social media, broadband internet, digital cameras, MP3 and portable music, stem cell research… the list goes on and on and on…

…Unless you can present your story in a way that’s completely believable, with rational reasoning and explanations, I think readers will struggle to believe that the world has ceased to advance, considering how quickly it advances in just two decades.

If you're setting up an unchanged future as a way of avoiding the thought and research that would go into creating a changed future, I'd say you'll hit bumps down the road. It smacks of laziness (sorry) and I think a stunted future may be harder to believe than whatever fictional future you could dream up.

I guess it comes down to whether setting your story in the future is just a quirk that you want to add to your story or whether the whole story revolves around and depends upon it. If it’s the former, I would consider setting it in the present and removing the difficulty of believability. If it’s the latter, you will have work to do in convincing your readers as to why the whole human race stopped advancing in the way it has done since time immemorial. You'd be better off doing the work of creating a 'realistic' future.

Original score: 5