I am writing a book alongside another author. It is about an illegal vegetable farm in 2070 after a global food shortage. The culture of real food is illegalized in most of the world and all food is replaced with synthetic food.
We are trying to make this book as believable as possible, so what we need are reading recomendations and advice on botany and famine
Other urls found in this thread:
lifehacker.com
twitter.com
Step one: don't write it about that, unless it's a satire or something. The premise sounds dumb and uninteresting.
Step two: try to come up with a different premise. Before you do that, it might be good to think about what you want the overall meaning/theme of the piece to be, then come up with the premise from that.
Step three: don't assume that just because you have another author working on it, it's going to work out great. If you notice something awkward/bad, don't hope that they'll fix it for you in revision. Do your best.
KJV
Why is real food illegal? What caused the original famine? How does the farm stay undetected? What would the punishment be if they were caught? Is this the only illegal farm or do they know others?
What happened to farmers markets :(
All of these questions should prob. make it in so it's believed, cant think of anything else
Read Carol Deppe, esp. breeding your own vegetable varieties and the resilient gardener. Joel Salatin might be interesting, as well as a good read overall. There is stuff about hunting for mushrooms somewhere in Michael Pollans works that is genuinely impressive and also the books are going to be a good overall inspiration. There is some hunting also.
Than go for some decent organic farm management books and look into permaculture.
what
Also, ecology and the logic of farming. Ecological succession.
There are dense woods. And sometime there is a disturbance and certain plants take advantage. And those plants most often use animals to spread their seeds to other clearings by the vehicle of shit. Also grazing animals eat saplings as to maintain edible grass. There is always hard logic behind the appearances in nature.
#
This is very helpful. My colleague and I will follow your advice. Thanks.
OP, is there anything about your work that makes it unique as compared to other dystopian novels of oppressive governments being resisted by underdog freedom fighters? Anything at all?
It has turned into a more overwrought trope than zombie movies at this point. Will it feature a quirky (yet still mary sue, of course) self-insert protagonist? Will the secret vegetable garden inspire those under the anti-food regime to rise up against their oppressors? Will the government and resistance be vaguely evil vs. good enough for those of every single political ideology to see what they want to see?
His premise isn't even that strong for something like that, either. Who wakes up in the morning and says to themselves, "You know what I want to read right now? A dystopian novel in which a bunch of farmers grow illegal vegetables. I think the fact that said vegetable growing would be illegal would really add tension. It would also be cool if the author went into excessive detail about the ecology of the farm, because nothing screams 'dystopian future' like an irrelevant botany lesson in a fictional book."
I like the premise. The idea of foregoing real food for synthetic is definitely a touch stone for many people who like their fitness, so to me it has potential.
You don't have to solve many problems, plenty of people plant guerrilla crops and farms already. So long as it sounds like they're almost growing dope it'd be believable to me at least.
You might also want to look into CPULs and community gardens and all that. Also that King of the Hill episode where Hank joins that organic market thing.
As for previous attempts at saving the world from famine, green revolution was where some of the surplus from the (fairly) new big oil industry was transformed into synthetic fertilisers. There were then used extensively in the US and developing countries (everywhere really) to increase crop yield mostly through increased nitrogen content in the soil. This obviously has had its issues, and hasn't worked everywhere, but is one of those things where a lot of people have drank the kool aid and we'd all be dead now or something if it wasn't for that. Similarly, increased use of pesticides and herbicides also have this argument, as does GM. I can easily imagine having to eat tasteless sludge from gm algae in the future and being told it's a miracle of technology in much the same way we get those big but watery tomatoes that taste of nothing and have less nutritional value, but because they weigh more they increase tonne/acre yield of tomatoes.
also the cycles, you know, growth, stagnation, rot, new growth. Happens with leaves and trees, happens with civilizations. You can build kinda mystical observations about that.
Mycorhizae is insane cool concept. Plants give 10 to twenty percent of its production to mushroom mycelia underground, the mycelia become a sort of extended roots. Some mushrooms are predatory also. Some mushroom are magic...
And growing mushroom on dead wood, I mean, that is something they would do right?
He also might find some use in checking out the different patents they have on seeds, crazy stuff.
the issues are complex... feeding the world argument - for how long is the question. You have more food, you have more people, but you are not at some limit, you will have starvation always. And what you gave away is the firm belief, that no matter how much our generation fucks up, there is the future one to try again. Industrial agronomy destroys the soil, is that news to anybody?
Also the dystopian theme failed imho, I would go more the direction of huxley, than in the orwell, more empty fulfillment against painfull life outside, would make a main hero that rejects his father and goes to live in the civilization and discovers, that under all its polish and sugar and stuff, it's just a bunch of people being afraid. So he returns and finds his village purged. Mix in a bit of resnicks kirinyaga.
So I like the theme too, but you have to handle it well, its still just a theme, a flavor.
Best of luck op. Work hard and you will be satisfied.
>feeding the world argument - for how long is the question. You have more food, you have more people, but you are not at some limit, you will have starvation always.
My own opinion on the green revolution is that it's all smoke and mirrors. There may have been some real improvement in yield, but in my reading and some experiments focusing on NPK values alone increases water content above all else. It's very similar to injecting meat with water to exaggerate yield. This then created market conditions that encouraged other fairly risky/inefficient short term practices like slash and burn. (My reasoning: for crops aimed at people like it doesn't matter so much about nutritional content. One tomato is fungible with another, you can't see inside it and tell if it has more vitamins and minerals. So cheapest per weight wins for supermarkets or w/e. However if you're producing a food animal like a cow, you feed it poorly you get poor meat and people can see that in marbling and other bits of fat and so on. One of the problems is getting enough protein into them, and after the green revolution you see more problems with this, leading to meat being fed to cows as a protein source, and way more slash and burn soy bean farms to produce high protein soy meal for animals.)
(Also from reading and experiments again plants seem to be able to absorb amino acids from the soil. They grow better if there are good levels present. The Green Revolution increased nitrogen content through production of ammonia, when imo nitrogen content has to be in the form of amino acids. And it seems to me that some plants are better at producing aminos than others, some seem unable to meet their own needs for decent growth. Unsurprisingly peas and beans that traditionally were used to fix nitrogen into the soil are really very good at making their own protein probs through their symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria.)
I have nothing against these technologies in principle, but the way they've been used is not fit for purpose, and almost inevitably their complexity is vastly underestimated.
We do not exactly know how soil works, but what is obvious is that there is basically a limited amount of it and we are "mining" it.
The problem is the consumer individualism. We feel that we can choose best for ourselves, but we do not bother to gather relevant information. Neither we want to be chosen for.
We (wifey, me, junior) are part of the csa program and it is a bit pricey, bud very good only for the feeling.
Fuck free choice. Hang the marketer! Eat the rich! Harr
Watch the film 'Silent Running'.
lifehacker.com
I dont understand how and why would this be illegal under ANY logic?
Those potatoes are the intellectual property of Nomsamto and you are committing theft of intellectual property by growing them. You wouldn't grow a car.
Eh i see your point, but with modern tools it should not be impossible to cultivate your own brand of vegetables/cereals from literal 0 point from natural samples.
I don't know what route OP will go down, but you only have to change the rights surrounding one thing in the process to ban it. So if storage of rainwater or use of aquifers is illegal that may effectively ban farming, same for access to land or soil or light, or if any practice of agriculture is deemed too damaging to the environment that it's highly regulated. There's quite a few routes to go really.
Fuck this guy. If you write reasonable historical events that provide a logically sound reason for your world's status quo and present these events and related facts in an efficient and interesting manner, it will work.
Also I jumped the gun with saying "fuck this guy."
Pretend I said "fuck step one."
Maayyybe. This seems to me something that is next to impossible to ban since there is so many work-arounds. No soil? Time to plant in that soya mush. No water? Break out waterpurifier for your own urine. No light? ... erm im sure you can grow some fungus.
As for enforcing this it would be literal nightmare. Not to mention drawing lines between farming and foraging. I know several places where there mushrooms grow each year and lets not even go in whole "lets clear this forest in a way to support berry growth" area of gray.
>This seems to me something that is next to impossible to ban since there is so many work-arounds.
For OP's story to work there must be a work around, tho that wouldn't stop it being illegal illegal.
Problems of good quality soil and water purification are already affecting agriculture right now, and even if they weren't harder problems than you might think I hope you can appreciate how this might easily be such a hassle to do and be such a high cost to the person if caught that only a few would choose to do this.
Even though it'd make sense, don't call it "Hunger games" their is already a book with that title.
I am certain i could get a SOME sort of farm going in my city flat within 24 hours if i chose to do it. Not to mention how easy it would be to do in rural area. Yay "wild potatoes" in your forest... what luck!
Damn. I thought this was meant to be a slow board.
Have your farm represent Greece and the synthetic food industry the EU-troika. Then have starving people flood over into your farm as a metaphor for the immigration crisis.