Dronefall is a six-book series following a young Christian woman wo chooses not to be conformed to the ways of her dark twisted world, but instead to seek out the truth behind its web of lies and manipulation. It’s a futuristic world, but under its trappings of drone-swarmed skies, autonomous surveillance technology and centralized information control, it’s a familiar place.
I most often describe Dronefall as “Christian Futuristic Fiction” to laypeople, because I think that’s a genre everybody can understand without further definition. But at the same time, does that put it in the same genera as Left Behind? Is Dronefall “End Times Fiction?”
How would I classify “End Times Fiction?”
While End Times Fiction is Christian Futuristic, not all Christian Futuristic is End Times. Let’s nerd out about this a bit.
In this diagram, you can see I did something a little controversial. Here’s my logic. I find it easiest to categorize the broader genera of Christian Fiction by their time-periods—their settings on the timeline. Contemporary, Historical, Biblical, Futuristic. But if you think about it, End Times Fiction actually falls under Futuristic and Biblical.
Okay, so this graph isn’t perfect. You could group Biblical under historical, but I think most people who are looking for books would prefer it be its own thing. The events of the Bible occupy a different category in most people’s minds than some random story set in ancient Greece, for example. And in the same way, End Times fiction and Futuristic fiction are different things, in a way. End Times fiction, once again, deals with the events of the Bible.
The Rapture, The Tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist, Armageddon—actually, I would probably more accurately classify End Times Fiction as the intersection of Biblical and Speculative. Because, try as we might, we’re going to have to simply study and speculate to portray the events of Revelation in a literal fiction-story form.
But How Would I Classify Dronefall?
Well, the short answer is, it isn’t End Times Fiction, technically. It’s focused on a smaller scale, and doesn’t try to interpret the events of Revelation. Not because I don’t think we should try, but simply because I didn’t choose to build it around that. Here’s my chart-placement for Dronefall.
Speculative Fiction covers everything from fantasy to sci-fi to horror, in some cases. (Not all horror is speculative, unfortunately.) There is a growing Christian booklist under all these categories. Futuristic spec fic would be any of these genres set significantly into the future. Dronefall is set in 2043-’44. That’s coming up fast, but it’s still futuristic enough for me.
Then there’s Dystopian. Now, there is, of course debate on what makes a book truly Dystopian. Some argue that it has to be a society that is built on Utopian ideas taken to the extreme to the point of becoming a terrible place to live. If you go with this belief, an apocalyptic story isn’t dystopian, but a post-apocalyptic one could be, if, in the wake of the world falling apart, society rebuilt around a rigid order that, while originally meant to solve a problem, ended up creating plenty more of its own.
The looser definition is just a nasty broken society, typically with too much control by the elites, whoever they may be. Dronefall easily falls under this umbrella.
So, if you ascribe to the second definition of Dystopia, most all cyberpunk would be a dystopian subgenre.
What is cyberpunk?
When you look up what cyberpunk is, the phrase “high tech lowlife” comes up pretty often. Cyberpunk is a technology-saturated but typically run-down and chaotic world full of hackers, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and, notably crime. Cyberpunk typically focuses on a technologically advanced underworld with complicated confused morals and a lot of gray-area characters. Dronefall’s labyrinthine cityscape, overrun by semi-autonomous drones and fog-breathing trains, creates a fantastic backdrop for the questions and dilemmas Halcyon and her friends have to face.
Bringing Christianity into the cyberpunk world puts a whole new spin on it. While the genera is typically inhabited by antiheros and characters who will do what they can get away with by whatever means they have, the presence of an absolute moral right raises even more questions. Halcyon sees the oppression and injustice in her world and she knows there is a right and a wrong way to fight it. But where to draw the line? And when?
And who’s with her and who’s against her?
Is Dronefall set in the End Times?
Getting back to this question. Yes. Am I going to end by having all the characters Raptured out to escape their problems, so I don’t have to solve them? No, don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that to you. But people within the story aren’t afraid to talk about it.
Oddly, out of the Christian Dystopian books I’ve read, there’s very little to no mention of Jesus’s return, or the hope of Earth’s redemption ultimately being in His hands. I’m not sure why. It’s not natural for a Christian cast to not look for hope in the future that way. I want to bring that discussion back into the story.
Because when it gets dark, God shows up.