What is the story I want to tell? I want to show people what I'm afraid of in terms of inequality mixed with the potential domination of negative human attributes over humans generally, mismanagement of technology, and/or resource mismanagement (including the resource which is the environment and population control). In positive terms, I want to show various presentations of utopia, but I think that's less imminently important. To what extent can these fears be combined in a single narrative? I think that the inequality, domination of negative attributes, technolgy mismanagement and innability to properyly manage resources and the environment can all be combined easily enough, but that if you through population control on top of the negative narratives, it becomes easy to view population control as just another negative. Maybe I could have the population control idea be the savior of the story; the hero could wield some population control mechanism/idea as his or her saving grace on an otherwise cruel and dehumanized world. This seems tricky though, and there isn't any such plot device that immediately comes to mind.

I kind of like the idea for a rift that I had earlier. Maybe that idea could come through literally and figuratively, from one side to the other. Maybe it could take the form of elective consciousness merging, and the merged beings could also somehow gain enhanced capacity in terms of empathy and intelligence in order to work around the power structures that arose from dominance of negative human characteristics. It feels though like there are a lot of ideas that I'm throwing around rather loosely now though, some of which I haven't even written down yet, so let's at least try to put them in one place: rift between split futures of a universe with a shared past, some people can traverse the rift from each side to interact with each other, people on each side may or may not have a parallel person on the other side to which they are linked, on side of the rift evolves along a sort of (birghtest future) but the other side progresses along the antithetical path toward darnkess, the villian of the dark side kills a no body who happens to be the hero of the light side (both of these characters follow a matriarchical lineage from a common ancestor and the people that form the lineage in both sides of the rift are important, well-known characters to the reader). Maybe the dark side of the rift could create the technology for the consciousness merge, but maybe it was created with a different purpose and intention in mind (like direct control/takeover of other conscious beings or something). Maybe it can be a thing that was developed for merging much earlier on the light side of the rift, and so when it gets developed by the baddies on the dark side, the "good guys" are prepared and start using it to fight back.

I like the idea of a plot that spans generations, but that doesn't really lend itself to characters that stick around to to whom people can form deep connections. Could this all take place over a very condensed timeframe? I'd have to drop the idea of paralleled people unless the plot took place over a few years, but it happened say 30 or more years in the future. Let's say it happened just one or two generations in the future, and a lot of the universe-level mechanics were more or less taken for granted by the characters, so that the audiance got to focus on the characters themselves and the struggle between good and evil. Then the background of the universe-level conflict could become real to the audiance much more slowly after they had already grown attached to and started focusing on the characters. Anyone who struggled with the universe-level interpretation could ignore it, but it would be there for anyone interested in looking at that angle. Seems solid to me right now, but I'm tired. I'll have to reread this tomorrow and see what I think!