Author Spotlight - What's the future like before "the" war? by Gail Delaney

I love writing speculative/futuristic romance because I can really let my imagination ask the question "What if..." The big 'what if' question in this whole series is "What if we made First Contact in 2008 with a superiorly advanced race who claimed to be our ancestors?"

There are many tangents that question can take, but I'm going to focus on the way I see our world changing given this situation. Since I am writing these books set mid-21st Century, I had the latitude of adding advances while still making the world feel very similar to our own. When you consider the fact those people who would be middle aged in this series would be children now. How would this decade affect an adult in the future?

I had to consider the fact that after that point of first contact, everything changed. There might be set points in time, such as the earthquake in Japan, but social events would change. Since in this theoretical timeline, George W. Bush would have been president at first contact, I theorize everything after that would be different. It is very likely Barack Obama would not have been president as the political situations that encouraged his election would not be at play after we suddenly share our world with aliens. There would be a focus shift. And all elected officials after that, right up to the first planetary ruler in 2017, would be different.

So, in the 2050s when the Phoenix world begins, we no longer have individual countries and governments. The Earth is governed by an elected president, but prior to the 'war' our government had begun to be strongly influenced by our alien 'benefactors'. Medicine has advanced to include genetic screening, DNA manipulation, and we were just flirting with the idea of planned parenting (in that individuals would be matched for reproductive purposes with the best possible income). Many genetic defects have been theorized to have been removed from our gene pool.

Religion has slipped from our everyday lives as people have fallen under the influence of our extra-terrestrial benefactors who have convinced far too many that belief in a being greater than themselves is foolishness. Holidays as a whole, whether it be Christmas, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, any country or ethnic holiday, have been slowly removed from our calendars.

We have space flight, but only so far as our benefactors will allow, slowly feeding us tiny bits of knowledge so we feel as though the world is progressing when in truth we're being held back.

But, beneath all this are those few who think beyond the words of the aliens. Those who don't swallow the lies. Those who seek the truth. That story begins in The Phoenix Rebellion, and continues in this new series... Phoenix Rising.

Come back tomorrow to read how things are 'after' the war.