(This is basically just me splurging thoughts so please don't expect anything but a horrendously garbled stream of consciousness from this post)
-
A
Kalotopia (from the Ancient Greek words 'καλός/kalós' - meaning noble, beautiful, just, or morally good - and 'τόπος/topia' - meaning place) is a variety of timeline or fictional universse I would like to develop in the future and I'm working on currently in
Fear Nothing But God. The general idea of a Kalotopia is to give me an excuse and a motivation to write more uplifting and to try and break the cycle of Alt-Histories developing into dystopic/semi-dystopic miseries or a victory lap for the author's belief system. Many if not most of the Timelines I really really adore (LTTW, Our Fair Country, W3L) end up being darker than our timeline and this is particularly present in mainstream Alt-History, which tends to focus on situations where the "bad guys" win a conflict (often, I notice, with no examination or acknowledgement of the times in OTL history that the "bad guys" won).
A Kalotopia is intended, as the name implies, to be a world better than our own, considerably better than a dystopia and not so outlandish or detached from reality as to be a utopia. Utopias are, by definition and intention, unrealistic and impossible. A Kalotopia, whilst potentially very unlikely, should always be a
possible world. In order to develop this, I'm laying out a set of rules for myself.
A Kalotopia
should include:
- A more equal and peaceful modern world than OTL
- A global history, which can focus on a specific nation or region of the world but should always have in mind the influecnes of the outside world upon this region and vice-versa
- Ideological variety
- An exploration of alternative "goodness", trying to find ways to create a better world more interesting than "What if the nice people won this election/war/ect".
- A realistic, sensible sequence of historical events.
A Kalotopia may still (and, for accuracy's sake, probably should) include:
- Natural disasters
- Warfare
- Inequality
- Dictatorships, authoritarianism and corrupt rulers
- Discrimination and inequality
- Rises and falls in peace and happiness
- A diverse array of popular and successful philosophies, ideologies, political systems and leaders.
A Kalotopia should
avoid:
- Major, global, industrial-scale Genocides such as OTL's Holocaust or the Armenian, Rwandan or Cambodian Genocides, ect
- The creation of purely evil ideologies (such as OTL Fascism/National Socialism), instead emphasising nuanced ideologies that may seem distasteful or wrong but are redeemable/have significant benefits.
- 'Wanks' (which is a term I really hate) of certain nations, ideologies, cultures or faiths
- A simplistic "Whigish" Approach to history with a continuous trend towards freedom, democracy and other nice things.
A
Kalotopia is not intended to be fully realistic, ranking somewhere around a Type II on the
Sliding Scale of Plausibility. It is however inteded to be an enjoyable, interesting and nuanced world that is pleasant to read and to write, more positive than most and gives a set of rules to encourage more realistic, interesting, nuanced AltHistory. It might be a reality without world wars that muddled through the 20th century with only little skirmishes here and there. It might be a world that butterflied away the Rwandan Genocide or Columbine Killings. It could even be something as small as avoiding the
Challenger Disaster and preventing those 7 deaths. Whatever the case, Kalotopias should acknowledge the bad things about OTL, examine the series of events that led to them and plot a different, brighter course.
I plan to add to the list of rules above, to give myself proper constraints and ensure the world I'm trying to build sticks to its initial goals. If anyone is reading this I apologise for the ramble!