Stories for James Nicoll's Nightmarish Future

So James has often alluded to a "nightmarish future" in which none of
the doom predictions come to pass and there's a trend towards
increasing prosperity, security, and equality in the world.
(nightmarish, I think, because it's too strange to contemplate within
the tradition of dystopic science fiction -- do I have that right, or
right-ish, James?)

Some of the things he's talked about with regard to this future are (I
mayb have interpolated some of these from things I thought about in
response to things James has mentioned):

-- the population bomb is a dud. Population growth is levelling off
and may even go mildly negative in this century without worse
pandemics than we're now witnessing.

-- the trajectory for illensses is to become less lethal, not jkust
due to medical technology adapting to the new diseases, but dueto
public health measures and evolutionary pressure on both humans and
the disease organism.

-- the lethality of war, and the incidence of war, have been falling
since WW II, and there's reason to think this is not a temporary
phenomenon but a permanent one.

-- some of the human-made environmental disasters that have come to
pass have proved less damaging in the long run than they seemed like
they would be. Chernobyl, for example, spread a lot of radiation over
a large distance, and a whole lot in an area which was closed to human
habitation because of it, and now it looks like the habitat around
Chernobyl has been much more resilient than it looked like it was
going to be. Other examples might be the return of the brown pelican,
and salmon in the Thames.

So these things have been lumberound around in my brain for a long
time, trying to breed plot bits and so on. I'm thinking that they are
probably needing to be pollinated by less sangune ideas in order to be
fertile.

-- The inexorable rise of sea level, and its consequences (island
nations displaced: lower salinity in ocean waters, with consequences
for the organisms living in the water and for currents -- there are
already some true concerns about the Gulf Stream and the North
Atlantic).

-- overfishing

-- the loss of tropical forest: would this be offset, as far as
atmospheric conditions go, if temperate forest returns in places which
have been abandoned from agriculture, idustry, and large-scale
residentia;l uses?

-- demographic stresses (James or Charlie or maybe somebody in some
other context completely had something to say about the concern around
the upward shift in age, but I can't remember the argument, only that
I remember I didn't think that the conclusion was warranted: the
conclusion being something like having a lot of old people to take
care of and not so many young people to do it was never going to be a
problem)

Anyway, I'm thinking about these things.

I failed at my plan to keep Nicky company writing shorts in November,
but I got most of the way through a storm and eroding coastline story
where the point is that the people are making a positive adaptation to
the change.But making the thing shaped like a story is kind of hard.
It's got a lot of noise in it and some flirting, though.

Anybody else trying to write things that are not dystopic and not
utopian? Generally optimistic, but with enough conflict to make a
story?

Lucy Kemnitzer, still
chapter 19 is up:
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis/donor/donorweb/donorindex


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