The Hunt for the Great Bear

I've finished Part One of my new novel, and am just about to start on Part Two. I thought this might be an apt time to write a few words about it. It's set in what may be a far distant future, another ice-age, when life, both animal and human, is in the process of disappearing from the world. The humans don't know this, of course, just as for them their life is not being lived in the future, but in the present. As much of the book is being written in the first person, then this may seem to present a particular difficulty for the writer - how to create a sense of a future world, when the voice in which one is writing, or speaking, has no sense of it being the future. I struggled with this apparent problem for some time, until I came to the realisation that, as this is a work of fiction, then, like all fictions, it is its own imagined world, and belongs neither to the past or the future, but only to the present. Its own, eternal present. So, though I may say for convenience's sake, that it is set in the future, in fact it is set in the present, which is an imagined one. As all fictions are set in their own imagined presents. Even meticulously researched historical novels, which may appear to accurate down to the tiniest detail, are in fact as imaginary and therefore illusory, as a work set in some fabulous future. So, I've come to think of "The Hunt for the Great Bear" as an ancient myth set in the future which is taking place now. In other words, it is a fiction.