Sunday, October 16, 2011

Idea Garage Sale: Recurrent Preoccupations

Two biologists/biogeneticists discover the secret of life by accident, creating a species of homunculi. Though kept in a "paradisial" aquarium/safe enclosed environment they escape to live as "Borrowers."

Talk about your huge ideas! The trouble with this one is that the part that attracts me most is the "living as Borrowers" trope, which though important would suffer from lack of attention to the other issues - like that little matter of discovering the secret of life! There's just something about the notion of people in an outsized environment...I've been playing with variations of the tiny people motif since at least 4th grade, but I think I exorcised the need writing Margo's House, which hardly anyone but my mother-in-law likes much.

The alien invasion of Earth parallels historical invasions on Earth. Expressed as an unfavorable review of an historical/anthropological work by an alien, who is accused of exaggerating the value of native cultures and underestimating the long-term benefits to humans of their subjugation.

Ah, satire. Howard Waldrop could write this story and not annoy people. I couldn't. The True Meaning of Smek Day did me the favor of accomplishing everything this concept would have tried to do, much better than I could have.

An archeologist on another planet achieves heaven - dying and joining the dead city she's been investigating on the level of time at which it still exists.

My core notion of time travel is, that all times exist simultaneously and the human brain experiences it linearly because that's all it can handle. And no, that doesn't mean predestination - there's no "pre," and there's no "post," and free will is part of the system. This treatment appears in my head as an atmospheric piece, portraying the archeologist progressively thinking her way into the heads and lives of the members of the alien culture she's uncovering, fighting her way through anthropocentric assumptions; until she dies on the job and breaks through. In other words, no action at all in the usual sense. Requires a lighter hand than I've got.

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