History Literature / TomorrowTown

* WhatYouAreInTheDark: [[spoiler:Buster]] has a particularly impressive moment of this. [[spoiler:After a gigantic TraumaCongaLine in which he's reduced to a second-class citizen for being too clever and perceptive, gets his wife stolen by the local cult leader, is framed for said cult leader's murder, and gets nailed up inside his own home by the enraged townsfolk, he gets the opportunity to escape the ghastly CultColony he's stuck in. He does so... and then comes back with a fish-and-chip truck so his fellow 'zenvols' can have something tasty to eat for once in their miserable lives.]]

** Turns out that a DomedHometown is great... at spreading airborne illnesses like wildfire.

* SocietyMarchesOn: The system is inherently sexist because it was designed back in TheFifties.

* DomedHometown: Tomorrow Town is, naturally, one of these. Like everything else about Tomorrow Town, it turns out to be impractical. Trapping the population under a dome just means that airborne infections spread rapidly among the population, while relying on artificial light sources means that the light falls unevenly and the temperature is too humid, especially given the plastic SpaceClothes everyone has to wear. [[spoiler:Then the villain tries to [[SelfDestructMechanism melt the dome on top of everyones' heads.]]

* DomedHometown: Tomorrow Town is, naturally, one of these. Like everything else about Tomorrow Town, it turns out to be impractical--the climate is too humid, the light too uneven, and the dome prevents the free movement of air, causing colds and other airborne infections to spread rapidly. Then the villain tries to melt the dome on top of everyone's heads.

* DomedHometown: Tomorrow Town is, naturally, one of these. Like everything else about Tomorrow Town, it turns out to be impractical.

** The [[RobotBuddy Robot Helpers]] are useless and fall apart.

Tomorrow Town is a futurist's paradise. A sparkling [[TheSeventies 1970s]] idea of what the the 21st century will be. There are FoodPills, robots, a building-scale MasterComputer, and definitely no crime.

* TakeThat: There are a few gentle but nevertheless rather pointed jabs at "hard" science fiction going on. Throughout the story, it is repeated asserted -- with varying degrees of self-seriousness -- that Tomorrow Town and its founders don't hold with silly "soft" science fiction concepts like teleportation or hackneyed premises like computers gaining sentience and going mad and trying to take over the world, and that everything about the project is based on rigorous extrapolation from current technological trends and in-depth consideration of probability and viability of the concepts they develop. Of course, all of this rigorous extrapolating doesn't mean that they can't be ''wrong'', or that if and when they are wrong they won't end up looking just as if not more silly once a few decades have passed. The tendency of classic "hard" sci-fi to treat the feelings and preferences of actual ''people'' as either mechanistically predictable or irrelevant to the course of future history is also parodied, as Tomorrow Town's lack of ergonomic design and obliviousness to its "zenpass" underclass's discontent is painfully obvious. Newman, it should perhaps be noted, tends to write in horror and "soft" science-fantasy, two genres that typically tend to attract a bit of aloof condescension at best and outright snide dismissiveness at worst from advocates of hard science fiction.

* TakeThat: There are a few gentle but nevertheless rather pointed jabs at "hard" science fiction going on. Throughout the story, it is repeated asserted -- with varying degrees of self-seriousness -- that Tomorrow Town and its founders don't hold with silly science fiction concepts like teleportation or hackneyed premises like computers gaining sentience and going mad and trying to take over the world, and that everything about the project is based on rigorous extrapolation from current technological trends and in-depth consideration of probability and viability of the concepts they develop. Of course, all of this rigorous extrapolating doesn't mean that they can't be ''wrong'', or that if and when they are wrong they won't end up looking just as if not more silly once a few decades have passed. The tendency of classic "hard" sci-fi to treat the feelings and preferences of actual ''people'' as either mechanistically predictable or irrelevant to the course of future history is also parodied, as Tomorrow Town's lack of ergonomic design and obliviousness to its "zenpass" underclass's discontent is painfully obvious.

* FanService / FanDisservice: In-universe; the inhabitants of Tomorrow Town all wear the same unisex clothing. It looks very flattering on the women. Less so on the men. It further underscores the idea that the founder of Tomorrow Town is basically an old lech with some fairly outdated ideas about gender.

* {{Futurespeak}}: Deconstructed. Turns out that it's just the result of Zhoule being atrocious at spelling and forcing it on everybody else.

* AssholeVictim: It becomes clear that the victim, Zhoule, was not a nice man by any stretch of the imagination, just a {{Jerkass}} who liked to impose his will and ideas onto the community he was running. When the ideas proved to be unworkable [[NeverMyFault he would blame anyone else except himself]]. The villain insists that Tomorrow Town could actually have been sustainable were it not for Zhoule and his constant stream of bad ideas.

* FreeLoveFuture: Subverted; past relationships are ruled irrelevant unless they serve a purpose, but this is just so the community leader can jump anyone he wants.

Can be read [[http://www.johnnyalucard.com/tomorrow.html here]].