Over the next few weeks on the blog, I’m delving into the seven short stories and novellas contained within my recently released Love and Other Punishments dystopian sci-fi anthology.

This week: Sweet Dreams

Ali, a young journalist, investigates tech company Astral, which manufactures nightmare-suppressing nanotech for children. “Sweet Dreams” is the name of the software, which is injected into babies at birth, and is now as commonplace as routine vaccinations. A generation has grown up since parents started implanting Sweet Dreams into their children. As a result, teenagers now expect nightmares at the onset of puberty, along with other bodily changes, as the nanotech is programmed to disintegrate at that time. 

However, in a small handful of cases, the nanotech remains in operation, as nightmares are not forthcoming. Ali is one such person, as she has never had a nightmare. By contrast, her boyfriend Malcolm is an “anti-Sweet”: a child raised without Sweet Dreams nanotech by parents who had scruples about the software. Such people are a tiny minority, but with an apparent rise in suicides among those who failed to get nightmares at puberty has led to political controversy, hence Ali’s investigation into Astral. 

Murder and more murder soon follow, with Ali realising she may be in over her head in a web of paranoia, conspiracy, and cover-ups. But how high up does the conspiracy go? Who can she trust?

Themes of playing God and the dangers of mollycoddling are inherent in the subject matter, but quite honestly Sweet Dreams isn’t meant to be terribly deep. My main motivation in writing was to create a gripping tech-murder mystery novella. One thing I will add is that this absolutely and emphatically is not intended as an anti-vaccination metaphor, however much some readers may be determined to read that into it. 

That said, the prospect of putting nanotech and microchips in our brains is another matter entirely. It does alarm me when I read of people who’d be quite willing to embrace such technology without any qualms. Also, what parents do in this story, attempting in a very literal sense to protect their children from bad dreams, perhaps drew inspiration from overprotective parents I’ve encountered in real life. When they don’t let their children read scary books or see scary films (despite children’s inherent curiosity about such things), I think this can be developmentally stifling and potentially unhealthy. Then again, you’d doubtless expect nothing less than an opinion like this from a parent like me, given the nature of some of my writing (including my children’s novels). My views on such matters are well-documented.

To order a copy of the Love and Other Punishments anthology, click here (for Amazon in the US), or here (for Amazon in the UK). Digital versions are also available from Smashwords (and their various outlets) here.