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Henry's Quest

This is a novella I wrote in 2022-2023/01, my first complete original story to not get scrapped. While I've always wanted to make full-length novels, I chose to make this one a novella instead, for two reasons:

So I would finish it, because I have so much trouble finishing any stories because I lose interest in them
To use it as a sort of trial run, to find out if this universe is fun to write in, and if so, I'd make another story about one of the other characters in it. Also for this reason, I chose an "ordinary person's problems" type of plot instead of the epic scale stories that I really want to write, and a bland person, obviously less interesting than some of the side characters, as the protagonist.

Now, I want to give some background on the premise and how it evolved.

This story started from thinking about the trend of technology becoming less reliable. As a software engineer, this is something I pontificate about often but I think the best explanations of the topic are these:

Software developers have stopped caring about reliability

Preventing the collapse of civilization

So I got inspired to make a story about a world where this trend has continued: there'd be advanced technology, but most of it almost never works, nobody understands it and it's miserable to deal with.

(This The Onion video also helped spark the idea.)

But as the idea incubated, some things changed:

I decided that a natural companion would be climate change: the world is devastated by it so most housing has to be underground because the sun kills humans easily. This ended up taking focus away from the degeneration of technology.
I ended up making a plot that didn't involve much technology.

When I finished, the original degeneration of technology theme ended up like a footnote, it only really shows in the first scene. The story in its current form would probably have been better served by a completely different first chapter.

Overall, I'm moderately proud: I've finally made an original story that isn't complete garbage. But it's, again, not what I wanted. This always happens when I try to make stories :(