Sunday, March 13, 2016

Idea Garage Sale: Miscellany

I'm still here, in a weird place creatively and not at all to be trusted with the responsibility of a query. But have a few scattershot ideas scrounged from the universe.

Natural scientists who routinely tag themselves like the animals they study. No, seriously, there's scientists who do this. (I read it on Tumblr so it must be so! Or at least it can be rendered plausible, which is all the story really requires.) Obviously, this is a murder mystery.

Vampires doing scientific work in hostile environments. How do the pressures of the Marianas Trench affect them? How do they fare in the darkness of space?

Someday, society transcends capitalism (which, face it, does not work for the majority of us; if we lead lives of quiet desperation, the economic system we try to live in bears a huge part of the blame) and realizes that there's enough wealth in the system for everyone, not just those who are good at manipulating money, to survive and pursue lives free of the fear of poverty. What does that society look like, really? Resist the morphic field that pushes you to turn it into a dystopia, or a utopia for that matter. Who does the system work for? Who does it fail?

All systems, after all, fail somebody.

Consider your favorite fairy tales and myths from the perspective that all the different forms of gender expression and sexuality have always existed as a normal part of human experience. Which myths, tropes, and archetypes, which stories, bloom with unexpected possibility if we go looking for those experiences in them? Was Daphne asexual? Are the fairies intersex? How did Hercules feel during the time he spent disguised as a woman? Was it really a disguise?