Idea Garage Sale: Mice in the Alien Museum?

You have, of course, had story dreams, brilliant plots and situations that melted away and/or turned to nonsense as you woke. If you cultivate a certain habit of mind, you will start working on turning them into usable stories before you even wake up, and may even stave off the disappointment of realizing that it wasn't, in fact, brilliant for several minutes after waking. The one I had the other day sprawled out in so many directions that the viewpoint-I in the dream pulled out paper and started putting down notes, as fast as I could, and quickly came to realize that it sprawled way too much. I'd have to cut out 3/4s of the potential to make it a book; and all of the characters to make it an RPG campaign. But, as I woke and started putting my brain in order for the day, I realized that what I had here was a perfectly viable computer game scenario. Something I don't have the skills to develop, and insufficient force of will to learn at this juncture.

Or perhaps I should say that my creative engagement with the idea does not reach the threshold necessary to give me the force of will to learn. The subconscious doesn't care in the slightest whether you have the practical skills necessary to make the vision it hands you into something approximating reality. If it did, far fewer people would produce a sufficient number of works to gain the necessary skills to produce them (because the only way to learn this stuff is to do it, and you need an idea urging you on).

Anyway, the dream involved a small group of people who had been in some sort of aircraft (something orange and vaguely resembling a space shuttle) when it crashed in some isolated rocky frozen location. Deprived of all their communication technology and lacking almost all survival gear necessary to survive there, when they spy a set of Cyclopean metal doors set into a snowy cliff-face they have no hesitation about getting through them, though they assume it to be a secret installation of some government's. (Bypassing the security of these doors would presumably be the first challenge to solve in the game, but the dream hand-waved it, as all the Good Stuff was on the other side of the doors.)

Inside, they find themselves in a vasty shadowy warehouse/museum style place, full of computer banks and displays and stored modern human artifacts, all oddly mundane, but neatly labeled in a weird alphabet. Everything a modern human needs to survive is in this place, though arranged according to some inexplicable system, so that washers and dryers are on opposite ends of the place and there are no chairs anywhere near the tables, etc. Moreover, the place is frequented by Cyclopean metallic bipedal figures, who may be cyborgs or exosuits or straight-up robots, who are apparently maintaining the facility, but whose movements make no intuitive sense. Moreover, they don't seem to be using familiar senses - they can't detect a human running between their feet, but may inexplicably home in on one holding still behind a refrigerator. They are alien, truly alien - the survivors of the crash can't find a point of commonality that makes their behavior intuitive in any way.

The characters were all civilians who had deep distracting backstories and personal motivations that provided a lot of the sprawl my Viewpoint-I notetaker was trying to cut out. The game would ideally offer a selection of character avatars who could be played solo or in groups, possibly with AIs that could (simlike) run uncontrolled to allow a player to head-hop if she chose, all with individualized backstories and abilities that would affect gameplay. Pregame prep would involve choosing your team of survivors (I don't think the setting would lend itself to single-avatar play - you'd need to be in two places at once too often, given the hugeness and the lack of human-logical spatial connection among the exhibits), or perhaps being assigned one randomly and having to figure out how to make the best of it. You could have a lot of mini-adventures and puzzles, but the main three plot problems to solve would be:

1) Rescue/escape - using the materials at hand either to communicate with the outside world, or to repair the orange shuttle and leave.
2) Survival - as effective mice in this environment so full of useful stuff, yet so poorly designed from the point of view of human survival, dodging aliens whose behavior is bizarrely inexplicable.
3) Figuring out what in tarnation the aliens are doing here. Are they hostile, benevolent, or neutral? Are the scientists, soldiers, automata, reality TV stars? And what is the appropriate human response to whatever it is they are doing?

The biggest storytelling challenge here would be to establish the alien abilities, logic, and purpose in such a way that all the counterintuitive stuff in the warehouse's arrangement and the bipeds' behavior becomes logical when the character finally figures out the correct angle of view, without destroying the alien vibe. The chief coding problem would be to transfer that kind of logic to the AI, so that it behaves in a consistent manner that appears inconsistent.

I don't even play this kind of game. How in the world did I come to dream about it?

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?

Idea Garage Sale: Alien Adoption

So there's this adopted teen girl, a Type A personality, who's grown up with all the best adoption fantasies about her biological parents. She loves her adopted folks, of course, but they're so ordinary! And everyone agrees she's extraordinary. She's smart and not afraid to show it (or a know-it-all), she's a natural leader (or bossy, depending on your perspective), she's confident, she's defiant and talented and rebellious and Going Places, with her best friend trailing in her wake.

Her best friend, a quiet reflective type, is the one who overhears the alien secret agents talking in the marsh where they figure no humans will hear them. (She's in a bird blind, trying to see rails. Type A girl doesn't have the time or patience to hang out in bird blinds.) A female (more or less) alien secret agent had a liaison with a human, and Type A girl is the result. She put the baby up for adoption because her own lifestyle was too dangerous to be encumbered by her. Maybe the father died from getting mixed up with aliens? In accordance with the best adoption fantasy, the mother has kept an eye on her offspring.

Best Friend can't wait to tell Type A girl, who immediately sets out to make contact with her biological mother. The alien thing makes total sense and explains all kinds of things about her natural superiority to everybody else! It takes a bit of finagling, but the reunion is effected and Type A girl gets to go live in alien society.

Where she's not only nothing special, she's embarrassing and a bit shameful, though threats to her can be used as a lever when someone wants something from her mother...and she's not supposed to see Best Friend or her Adoptive Parents any more.

In fact the whole set-up blows chunks and she wants to go home. But she knows way too much about the aliens now...

Before you could even begin this story, of course, you'd have to know what's up with the aliens. Obviously there's factions involved, but what do these factions want? How and why are alien secret agents operating on earth?

And what do we mean by "aliens" here anyway? Extraterrestrials? Ultraterrestrials? Fay? Dimension-hoppers? Why should any of these be cross-fertile with humans?

How is Type A girl different from her parent stock, and how is she the same? What is the result of hybridization, and what does she do with that, once she gets past the showing-off stage?

For best results, this should be written by someone who grew up adopted.

Idea Garage Sale: The Cat Within

You, right now, this minute, as you sit here catching up on your blog reading, turn into a cat. What happens?

"Wait, what? How did I turn into a cat? Is this supposed to be magic, a curse, a mad scientist dosing my coffee, what?"

Well, that's the difference between idea and execution, isn't it? Every single person who ever starts from an idea like this will develop it individually. How and why the transformation happens will depend whether the author prefers fantasy, science fiction or horror.

Nor are those questions the ones that matter most. The difference between fantasy and science fiction is largely one of imagery and is of no particular moment to the story itself. No, the important story questions are: What problems are created by you turning into a cat? and What problems are solved that way?

The development of these problems into a plot, and the florescence of plot into story, will depend on who you are and what your life is like. Are you fond of, disgusted by, or indifferent to cats? Do you have a pet and how will it respond to you as a cat? Who do you live with, and how will those people react? Where are you supposed to go and what are you supposed to do after catching up on your blogs? Are you better qualified to write about dogs, horses, birds, or armadillos than cats?

The question that brings the story to its resolution is: How much control do you have over the transformation?

Writing a story is a matter of asking questions of yourself, and finding the answers however you can.

It's just that simple.

It's just that hard.

Idea Garage Sale: Humans Among Them

So we've all read and identified with stories of aliens among humans. I've written them myself (my first book, Otto from Otherwhere, and there's a short story about an alien anthropologist living in a trailer park in the December '91 issue of Asimov's). In a world where everyone (even those people most catered to by society, who are often the biggest crybabies about how misunderstood they are) feels isolated and picked on, this is natural enough. Space aliens, fay, wild talents - in addition to such characters being inherently cool they also provide a paradoxically safe metaphorical way to explore the very real grievances of the marginalized without upsetting the gatekeepers of literature, who are inevitably invested in the status quo, too awfully much. Which is a problem in itself but I'm not dealing the problems of society today, I'm looking at a problem in the tropes, which is -

That in the abductee literature from which the alien-in-human-society tropes are derived, what actually happens is that a human goes to live in alien society.

Changelings are abducted by fairies and kept for a time; possibly seven years, possibly life. The entity left in exchange for the changeling dies, either because it was a sickly fairy child elected for the swap because it wasn't going to live, because it was an old fay disguised as an infant, or because it was a stock of wood to begin with. (Or because the parents tortured it to death trying to get it to reverse the swap. There is an ugly, ugly reality behind the changeling myth and again, not going into that today.) In the alien abduction narratives of the nineties, human men and women were used for reproductive purposes, but the alien hybrid babies were either cultivated with stolen genes or harvested after a short incubation period and taken away, though sometimes the parents were allowed to see them briefly. In neither tradition is the alien raised in human society; the reverse is always true.

The fates of fairy changelings are occasionally explored in modern fantasy, but the emphasis is not on their experience, but on the efforts of the changeling's family to rescue them, or on the perceptions outsiders in the fairy court have of them. There's a disjunct between fairy traditions, which universally declare that the motive of the fairies in abducting babies is to raise them as their own children, and modern tropes, which tend to portray changelings as pets or slaves, a fate reserved for adults taken by fairies in the oral literature. The literary beginning of this change in perception of fairy motives is marked by the conflict between Titania, who wants to keep her dead human friend's child to raise, and Oberon, who wants to use him as a servant, which kicks off the magic hijinks in A Midsummer Night's Dream. (It has always bothered me that Oberon, having used an enchantment to cheat Titania of her adopted son, is allowed to retain this victory.) I am not aware of any science fiction that has yet treated the alien hybrid raised among aliens experience in any significant way.

I start here from my usual standpoint in dealing with Fortean material. I am not interested in whether or not the abduction experience has an objective reality; but for the purposes of a fiction I feel obliged to deal with the source material as if it is objectively true within the fictional world. Despite the broad similarities in the abduction experience that researchers (particularly John Mack and Budd Hopkins) claimed to find, there's a lot of leeway in this source material. Even the classic abductors, the Gray Aliens, have a surprising amount of variety when looked at in detail; and the reasons they gave for the cross-breeding project were vague and contradictory. Were they trying to inject some hybrid vigor into their own inbred and over-refined species? Were they trying to create a master race made up of a little bit of the genetic potential of all the intelligent races in the galaxy/universe/interdimensional crossroads/whatever unit of space/time they're dealing with? Were they trying to preserve the human race, which is scheduled to drive itself to extinction in the foreseeable future (which may yet be quite a long time, if the aliens think in geologic time spans and humans in terms of human lifetimes)? Was this pure or applied research? Presumably some of the inconsistencies between stories involve different factions with different purposes for similar research (think how many different specific experiments white mice and Rhesus monkeys who share the experience of taking part in medical research would have to compare) - what are the implications of these factions for the alien hybrids they create?

I get why this hasn't been done. You'd - well, I'd, some people are less fussed about this than me - have to read a whole bunch of abduction literature (and it'd be best if you could read Spanish and Portuguese, because there's an extensive South American abduction literature which is not available in translation) and do a lot of extrapolative world-building, just to figure out what kind of environment the human hybrid protagonist is raised in. Mother ship? Space station? Planet-based colony? Home planet? Are they adopted out to normal alien families, or raised in a creche with other half-humans, or with a melting pot of different species of hybrids?

What normal human abilities seem magic, funny, contemptible, or cute to normal aliens? Do people pity them for not being able to see infrared, and dismiss the ability to see the frequencies we think of as "visible light" as a trivial party trick? Do humans who can't develop psi power past the point of receiving telepathic communication and feeling when someone is staring at them get treated as defective? Do intersex hybrids, fitting into the norms of their alien society, have an advantage over hybrids who fall definitively into "male" and "female" categories? Is the heroine inherently scary because she has teeth? Is she disadvantaged in public spaces because she only has five fingers on each hand and is not naturally ambidextrous? Are her mating choices dictated or restricted? Do people stereotype her based on what they read in popular novels? Is she romanticized by one group, vilified by another? Is there a hybrid solidarity movement; and does it truly serve the needs of all hybrids? Do they love the alien parents who raised them and regard their human progenitors as strange and distant? Do they even know they're hybrids?

How do you write all this without making it just another lame metaphorical saga encompassing all marginalized groups and representing none?

Idea Garage Sale: Talking Animals of the Apocalypse

No way I'll ever use this one, but I bet somebody could do it right.

This was a story-dream. The post-apocalyptic dystopia was going on, and one of the features was, that anthropomorphic animals societies were A Thing. The totalitarian rulers were all what the dream was calling cis-humans (I know I'm appropriating the term cis here, way out of original context of contrasting the cisgender from the transgender, but it works pretty well to express the idea of "what society treats as the norm"!) while the oppressed classes were both the cis-human poor and modified animals much like the Talking Animals in Narnia - larger than their non-talking counterparts, with humanlike intelligence that didn't interfere with the specializations of their animals from which they derived. I specifically remember wild foxes and domestic goats. The "wild" talking animals lived separate from humans and the "domestic" talking animals were integrated as equals into the poor human communities, who regarded them as human equivalents; but the ruling classes regarded both kinds of talking animals as animals. So that at one point, for instance, one of them shot and skinned an intelligent fox because she wanted to wear the fur. At another point, the protagonists were saved from patrolling oppressors because the goats fooled them into overlooking the humans they were looking for - the goats were not considered seriously as intelligent agents.

So the oppressed are all working together, right? Not quite. It turned out that the Resistance had a number of different factions, all made up of cis-humans and intelligent animals (hmm, does tranimals work as a term here?) working independently and with little knowledge of each other. Something was preventing them from communicating and coordinating. Not from cooperating - the main thrust of the dream involved following the attempts of two parties who crossed paths in the field and jeopardized each other's missions to clean up the resultant mess, carry out both missions, and keep everyone safe from the oppressors who were suddenly swarming everywhere.

And there was some sort of boarding school that was becoming the locus of resistance because it was one of the few places that people from different communities could meet face to face? But the boarding school taught only cis-humans and was run by the oppressing class. (Think, Indian boarding schools of 20th century America, where Indian children were taken to be brainwashed out of their culture.)

I will never use this, because I don't even like dystopian fiction as a rule. Real life is as dystopian as I care to get and a little more, thank you! But if you came up with a premise that made the tranimals work, the whole story would work, and would fall into place.

BTW, the cis-humans? Should all be brown. Because in the future, we will all be brown.

Idea Garage Sale: The Physics of Misfortune

One of my recurring little fantasies, when I have a bad day, is that I'm taking a hit for somebody else. Like, if I am sick and unproductive, but my husband (whose health overall is much worse than mine) has a good health day, I pretend to get credit for that. Or I imagine that Moby's dying in an intersection and requiring hordes of bystanders to push him into the Walgreen's parking lot prevented an accident in which someone's child died. In these instances, my problem is always smaller than the unknowable problem I pretend to be deflecting. I'm not sure how this works in terms of the conservation of mass and energy, but presumably my wandering into the situation deflects the force of the disaster and changes its degree of momentum.

Or something. It's not as if we have a Physics of Misfortune. We don't even have a standard of measurement.

But what if we did?

What if you could precisely calculate how much misfortune you could take on behalf of someone else and how much it would benefit them?

How far would you take it?

And would it make a difference, whether or not you could aim it? Would a person who would accept maiming in order to save her own child from death accept a papercut to keep someone else's from an injury that needed stitches?

What if accepting a misfortune had an equal chance of benefiting either your daughter, or the girl who bullies your daughter?

What if you could prevent a single wartime death by breaking your leg, but couldn't control which side the person you saved was on?

The story works out differently, if this is a singular power discovered by the protagonist and maintained as a secret, or if someone actually works out the Physics of Misfortune and everyone has equal access to the power. In the former case, it's all personal moral dilemmas; in the latter, some jackass is bound to weaponize the ability.

I presume I don't have to expound to anybody on the potential for gender politics involved here, either? Didn't think so...

Idea Garage Sale: Annihilating Time and Space for Fun and Profit

One of my favorite themes is time travel. The prospect of full immersion in another time attracts me like open reading matter attract cats. I've thought about it enough to have a consistent, yet flexible, concept of how it needs to work for my stories; settled the predestination/paradox problem to my own satisfaction (though it's surprisingly difficult to get people to break out of their preconceptions enough to grasp my simple solution); and generally am comfortable with doing it. From a writing perspective, the main work in writing such a story now involves doing the research, evolving the characters and plot that arise naturally from the research, getting the butt in the chair - and, eventually, pitching/selling the damn thing, which is always the hardest part and no one wants to hear me whine about it.

But one aspect of the time travel concept remains largely unaddressed, and the gap is glaring. But it's so far removed from my own motivation for time traveling, that I have a hard time approaching it.

One of the technical difficulties of time travel, normally handwaved, is that the earth moves constantly through space. Not only does it orbit the sun, but the solar system moves through the galaxy, which in turn moves through the universe. If you go back in time a year, or a hundred years, or eleven millennia, without shifting in space (as my protagonists generally appear to do), you wind up in the vacuum of space where the earth is going to be at the time you leave. And if you go back in time and simultaneously shift in space (as so many books have people doing, with modern children winding up in Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Medieval France, etc.) it'd take an astronomer and a high-powered computer to run the data to arrive safely.

An effective time travel method is also, ipso facto, an effective method for traversing or bypassing vast regions of space.

Which means you should be able to repurpose the method in order to enable instantaneous interstellar travel.

That's - a pretty freaking huge concept. Arguably, huger than would fit into one book; though one of the pleasures of speculative fiction is the way large numbers of mind-bending concepts can be evoked and compressed into a single work as backdrop.

This connection is hinted at in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which both time and space are spindled, folded, and mutilated as the plot/comedy requires and "Infinite Improbability Drive" covers a multitude of contingencies (well, an infinite number) - but the Guide is a special case.

You could spend a career writing a loose series, either setting-based like Darkover or character-based like the Vorkosigan Saga, exploring the consequences of such a technology. One book could depict the experimental phase, as the Laws of Paradox and Free Will are formulated; any number could be spent on the Exploratory Phase; the political, economic, and social ramifications would run constantly in the background as plot complicators. Ancient cultures. New planets. Ancient cultures on new planets. Rivals forming alliances with the same culture in different eras. Extreme anthropology, with "experimental archeology" taking on a whole new meaning.

The author would have terrifyingly few limits. Success would mean a terrifying professional commitment. Disappointing sales on the first couple of books would mean a frustratingly curtailed creative experience.

I wish I'd stop having Big Ideas.

Idea Garage Sale: A Barrel of Worms

First of all, Happy Birthday, 19th Amendment. Whose provisions should have been included in the 13th Amendment, whose provisions should have been in the Bill of Rights. What can I say, freedom and equality are scary, especially for people who hold freedom as a privilege and fear their status would be lowered by equality. But that's not what I came to talk to you about, or maybe it is.

My Tumbler throws random stuff at me from people I follow for various reasons and it would be surprising if none of it stuck hard enough to form a story idea. So here's one: the operator of Feminism and Fandom was asked: something cis people never, ever get asked because no one ever tries to tell them their identity isn't real or just based on social constructs or other bs like that, but I'm curious: why do you identify as a girl?

And y'know, when you think about it, that's a fascinating question.

Me, personally, I have always felt completely congruent with my body. I am female; therefore, everything about me is of the feminine gender. This seems to me natural and right, and means that, for instance, if I or any other person of the female sex decides to engage in a behavior - gaming, or cooking, or birdwatching, or fixing a truck - that behavior is gendered feminine by the virtue of a female person undertaking it. The same behaviors undertaken by a male would automatically be gendered masculine.

But if most people felt like that, we wouldn't need a concept of gender at all; or at least, would only require it in the case of physically intersexual people, whose bodies are not distinctly female or male and who might then need the concept of gender as something distinct from their sex. But I'm not sure why they would; only that the people around them would feel a need to force them to choose a gender, whether they as individuals needed it or not.

It depends, you see, on what the gender concept is for. Which is far from clear to me. As human beings, our great unique adaptation is the ability to abstract general concepts from specific data, so we can apply lessons and skills from one experience to new, similar experiences. We often need fixed roles so that everyone knows what their individual job is and all the necessary stuff gets done without a lot of argument and daily negotiation over who is supposed to do what. Anybody who's ever tried to take turns doing chores with someone who never does his chores on time is familiar with that one. ("I'm only supposed to do dishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It's Wednesday, so it's your turn!" "But you didn't do any dishes Tuesday so you haven't had your turn so I'm not going to do any dishes." "Okay, I'll do last nights dishes later but the breakfast dishes today are yours." "No they're not!" Will somebody just do the stinking dishes so I have something to cook in!? Um, excuse me, intense flashback.)

And I can see how gender expectations could grow from a sexual division of labor, which - especially in societies without a huge technological base to draw on, such as we have now - does in fact make sense the way most hunter-gatherer societies split the actual labor. Men are less essential to perpetuation of a group than women and the responsibility and resource drain of protecting the fetus limits women's mobility, so giving the people who are most likely to be pregnant the less-risky, more sedentary jobs and the expendable people the high-risk running around makes sense. And once you got used to that division, and organized your society around it, the individual who didn't fit neatly into the schema would become a problem and need to be arbitrarily gendered in order to contribute. But an awful lot of non-practical, counterproductive, and just plain silly baggage that has nothing to do with survival goes into modern gender conceptions, while leaving intersexual people more in the lurch than ever, and none of it was inevitable, anyway.

Gender as a concept is increasingly a handicap, but one which we regard as so essential that we cling to it against all reason. Parents with a sexually ambiguous child are encouraged to assign it a gender and force it into one of two molds, which even adults who aren't sexually ambiguous frequently find poor fits and too confining. People of any age who try to present themselves as androgynous, or who choose a gender identity not congruent with their physical sex, are at best treated with prurient interest, at worst physically and legally persecuted. Even people who are aware of this and don't want to be uncomfortable around people of ambiguous gender often are. And yet, objectively, it shouldn't matter a lick.

So, let's step back and world-build for awhile. What if a society exists, of humanlike people, in which a person's role in society is determined by gender - but gender is not tied to a simple sexual dichotomy?

What if the crucial decisions of development all hinged, not on expressing a predetermined gender, but on figuring out what gender you are?

What if there's more than two genders?

What if all children are considered to be the same gender and the age of gender expression is not the same as puberty?

What else would society base a gender on? What if intellectuals are "feminine" and emotionals are "masculine?"

What if your gender category changed based on your age?

What if magic, or psychic, if you prefer SF to fantasy, ability is the determining factor?

This would require a serious grind of worldbuilding before you even started the story, and of course it's been done, sort of. Ursula K. LeGuin's classic Left Hand of Darkness deals with some of these issues, and feminist SF has done a lot of wrestling with gender roles generally. But it strikes me that at best the subject has been nibbled; and in a time when LBGTQ people are increasingly asserting their right to representation, it strikes me as ripe for serving up in a full-size dish.

Idea Garage Sale: When Worlds Co-Exist

So, having read about the two habitable planets closer to each other than Earth is to Mars you immediately start world-building.

But where do you start? When will your story be set?

It has to be post-crossworld-contact or what's the point? But is it at the beginning, when they start becoming aware of each other - which could be as early as the first Renaissance-quality telescopes? Is it at first physical contact? Is it when us humans stumbled across them? Is it during a period of peace, or a period of war?

Actually - if the two intelligent species I am assuming for each of these planets are enough like earthlings for us to write stories about them, periods of peace are probably non-existent. Everybody is always fighting somebody; and how each individual tribe/nation/state feels about interplanetary contact is probably vastly influenced by where in the war/truce/peace/annoyance cycle it is.

You could, of course, decide that only one planet has intelligent life, so there's no interspecies conflict, just a larger-scale colonization period, but that's underutilizing the setup and making it far too easy to fall into simplistic accidental allegories of the Discovery of the New World, without acknowledging the agency of the people who were already in the New World. I want different-but-equal. I want some real basic exploration of the idea of personhood, detached from biology; I want some really different stories!

What is each species like, for starters? What basic difference in the evolutionary histories of their planets shaped them?

What if one intelligence evolved in the oceans, complete with opposable thumbs or whatever other dodge full manipulation requires of their basic anatomy, and one evolved on land, not necessarily from primates? The vaccuum of space would be equally intimidating for both, but the technical problems presented by space travel, and probably the motives for space travel, would be different. A zero-G environment would not be half the adjustment for a cephalapodian intelligence that it would for an ursid one; but holey cheese wouldn't life support be complicated? The ocean-based species would probably regard long-distance sensing and communication as the easiest and most natural way to deal with extraplanetary activity; might lack the terrestrial urge to go there.

The ocean-based species could colonize the oceans of the terrestrial planet and the terrestrial species could colonize the continents of the oceanic planet - before either one became aware that the other was intelligent at all!

Oh, man, my head's exploding already and I don't even have a character yet.

Speaking of characters - this'd make a great RPG setting.

Help...drowning...sea of possibilities...

Idea Garage Sale, Reversed

So, I'm scheduled to be part of a coordinated blogging effort on behalf of the Andre Norton Award, as detailed at Erin Underwood's blog. My contribution will be on the 11th.

I volunteered from a sense of civic duty, but I don't have a clear idea of what I want to say on the topic. I'm sure I have something relevant and at least mildly interesting knocking around my head, but I don't know what it is yet.

So instead of putting up a garage sale idea, I'm browsing. Fiction ideas aren't the only ones out there. Anybody have anything they've always wanted to hear discussed about the Norton award, YA and MG speculative fiction, or anything related to them that I might be better qualified to discuss? Go ahead and run it by me.

Otherwise, there's no telling what I'll come up with.

Idea Garage Sale: World in a Building

Speaking of journals, here's what I find at the end of a rambling diatribe about how much I hated working at...a certain soul-sucking day job... what a huge waste of my time it was even existing there, and how they should have color-coded departments instead of making everything gray:

Is there a story about these cubicles? When I temped at [redacted], I had a little black fantasy about a society trapped there forever filing, keypunching, stuffing envelopes, totaling figures - never seeing the light of day. The great culture hero - a Tyll Eugenspiegel - was Wheelchair Annie, a woman who set the executive hierarchy on its ear and whipped around the building making life bearable. I would have to work out the background of such a world to make it plausible enough for anyone to take the story. It would be about getting out, of course - about the necessary mediocrity of the soul in the workplace - about a lack of windows.

There's something very mid-twentieth century about this idea; yet we are in fact getting to a place where making a small town in one huge building that no one ever left except through internet avatars could conceivably be made practical. It could even be some people's ideal life to live in a company town based on this plan - housing, daycare, elder care, health coverage, unlimited WiFi, all levels of educational facilities, gym - as long as you could keep the job, and strive for promotion to ever-more-privileged access to amenities, you wouldn't even need to be paid in money as we know it.

Until you were found wanting, or laid off due to economic changes Out There, of course.

Idea Garage Sale: Who are the Clones?

Clones.

A secret cloning facility, using the DNA of lab volunteers, unwitting grad students and miscellaneous tissue donors, and famous scientists long dead. Aliens, too, if you want 'em. None of your full-blown out-of-the-vat TV/movie clones, which not only have full use of their muscles but demonstrate that hairstyles are genetic; but proper clones grown from eggs to become babies to be raised. In the lab, according to whatever theories the scientists around are testing or espouse, subject to the vagaries of changes in funding priorities, facility politics, and personnel changes.

Of course when they hit their teens, they escape. Who wouldn't?

The first question to ask is, Of whom are they clones? How do they understand their relationship to their originators?

The second is, What other experiments were done on them in conjunction with just cloning?

Some of them might be chimerae, instead of clones. Combinations of star athletes with famous scientists, a merging of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison in an attempt to get The Perfect Inventor, supersoldier prototypes who are part human, part wolf, part sheep. What happens if we genderswap Albert Einstein? Or Lana Turner, whose career as a scientist is not nearly as widely known as it should be? Some of them might be vehicles for experiments in gene therapy: Let's see if we can clone Stephen Hawking and get a version with no major health problems.

You could have sets of nearly-identical twins, triplets, quads, or more, representing different runs of the same experiment.

Having assembled this core cast of characters, they will dictate the emphasis of the story as a whole; or, if you want a certain kind of story, you would choose a cast compatible with it.

It's a flexible concept that can be modified for different formats and different SF subgenres. You could have a lot of fun writing it for parody or satire. You could do a very dark, gritty story addressing the reality of cloning new creatures from mature tissue - a whole passel of kids facing early aging and death. You could do a whole series, with the kids escaping from the lab in Book or Season 1 and in subsequent ones adjusting to "normal" life, uncovering other labs, dodging government black ops, or whatever.

It's a suitable core idea for an RPG, too. I'm thinking a point buy system, with "heroic" rather than "superheroic" point totals. Tell your players the premise, let them pick the clone they want, and let them build them. You could have pregens of a few likely picks which could be customized, so if two people wanted to be clones of Albert Einstein, but if one wanted to be a genderswapped Einstein and one wanted to be Einstein + Babe Ruth, they could both get what they wanted by starting with the same base character and tweaking the appropriate features.

I'm afraid the work involved in doing this seriously is more than I care to face, as the research would be more technical and less historical or anthropological than I like; but I am having fun with a household of eight sim teens squatting in an abandoned warehouse, each one cloned and in some cases genderswapped or alienized from a familiar sim that comes with the game, or from those shared by the player with whom I swapped characters awhile back. Their cloning lab mysteriously burned down and now they just keep saying they come from France...

Idea Garage Sale: The Sea of Air

The September Fortean Times (already superseded at the website; I'm always a month or more behind the English newsstand) has a feature article that describes a killer, underused science fiction setting: Earth's atmosphere.

The theory set out by Scott Deschaine in "The Sky is Alive" is attractively elegant. Many UFO sightings, "star jelly," "angel hair," flesh falls, and other Fortean phenomena would make perfect sense if the atmosphere has life-forms adapted to it analogous to the life-forms of the ocean. Because the upper layer of the ocean and the lower layer of air are porous, engaged in a continual exchange of life and nutrients, there could even be creatures adapted to the ocean and the air at different stages of their lives. Many UFOs, after all, are reported to behave just like curious animals, and many of them even look like jellyfish.

These creatures would necessarily be light and difficult to see, but given the astounding diversity and resilience of life in our ecosystem, the possibility cannot be written off.

This idea has of course been used at least once in fiction, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His "Horror of the Heights," however, only scratches the surface of the possibilities for the setting, suggesting an aerial jungle in which live fierce invisible predators among whom pilots go at their peril.

The rousing exploration adventure is not currently fashionable in science fiction. A modern reader expects more plot, character angst, and social commentary than anybody ever expected of Doyle or even Heinlein and Asimov. You can't just take off into the sky and record discoveries of flocks of aerial jellyfish, sentient clouds, semi-intelligent sprites living in thunderclouds. But the story of the first exploratory mission, centering on a crew variously eager to explore the upper atmosphere or disappointed not to be going to the moon, a Mission Control plagued by budget cuts and political posturing, and an intrusive subculture of UFOologists convinced that this is one more cover-up by the Great Conspiracy would be complex enough for any hard SF reader.

As long as you worked the science angle hard enough, and didn't let it turn into the same old plot as the last ten blockbuster movies you saw.

Idea Garage Sale: Miracles, Mistakes, and Lies

I'm tired of leafing through my old notes; fortunately, I got a Fortean Times this week. FT 289 (the people on the newsgroup are already discussing FT 290, but they're mostly British and can get it regular mail, while my issues have to hitch a ride on a tramp steamer or something) contains, on page 10, in a "Back from the Dead" round-up article, the story of an Argentinian woman who was told her premature baby was stillborn. Twelve hours later, they decided they wanted to say good-by properly, so the hospital staff pulled the frost-covered body out of the morgue drawer. Her mother touched her hand, and the baby opened her eyes.

Woah. As a preemie, she still had only a 10% chance of survival, but that's plenty enough to start off with.

But we also get, on the same page, a Chinese case of an eight-month preemie declared dead at birth, on the grounds of no breath, no heartbeat, and a purple color. However, the child's aunt insisted on seeing the baby, which was handed to her in a "yellow plastic bag." In addition to being alive, the baby was a boy, not a girl as originally declared. Tracking down further news stories on the web, we find that this baby wasn't even found in the morgue, but in a restroom where someone had absentmindedly left him! The family is suing and large numbers of people have been sacked, reprimanded, etc. Not surprisingly.

The hospital staff in the second case has a plausible excuse for the sex change, in that there's still a strong preference for sons over daughters in China, and the nurses thought it'd be less of a blow to lose a girl than boy. Still...my goodness... you put these two together...

The Baby in the Yellow Plastic Bag could be dystopian science fiction, with the baby being a natural gender-switcher in a society in which flexibility is the key to survival. Or a grim realistic novel about modern poverty. Or a mystery, with the stillborn baby swapped out for a live one - by whom? Why? Or a legal thriller, with the baby's misdiagnosis revealing layer after layer of malfeasance that it's in Someone's best interest to cover up. Or a religious novel - the Argentinian baby was named Luz Milagros, Light Miracle, for obvious reasons. Or horror - the baby's body is alive, yes, but that's not the baby's original spirit in there. Or paranormal, as the baby's early NDE and imperfect separation from the spirit realm grants her supernatural powers. Or...

Yeah, the problem with this one is to stop having ideas!

Idea Garage Sale: Schroedinger's Note

This one's from my husband, Damon. So you see it's not just writers who do this!

We both just read The Future of Us, by Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker, and he was thinking. You have one of those high school notes where the writer gives the recipient a multiple choice question and the recipient ticks one blank and passes the note back. The question is a typical high school one - go to homecoming with me yes/no, free for lunch yes/no, like the same person as me yes/no - but the answer has repercussions.

This note is in a box. Until the box is opened, both answers are ticked. The person whose job it is to open the box can't bear to do so, and will be living the repercussions of both answers alternately until the box is opened.

An advantage of making this a high school story is that certain events are locked in - the homecoming dance will occur on schedule, the protagonist is already committed to certain extracurriculars and classes, the parents' job and marital milestones and difficulties will not be changed by the protagonist's behavior - so that it's a simple matter to examine the different emotional repercussions of each answer and the ripple effect of each within the peer group within a locked-in framework. Sooner or later, though, a situation will arise in which the way a major decision is made, one that follows logically from the original note, and from that point the future is locked in - the protagonist can't have it both ways anymore. To be fully effective, both futures should have notable upsides and downsides and the decision should be a lot harder than the question posed by the original note.

The problem here is that the logical person to open the box is not the person on whom the decision depends, but the person who asked the question in the first place. Which is all kinds of messed up - by asking the question, he's deflected the decision onto someone else and having done that, he can't very well take the power away. You could change it so that the object in the box is a wish object, but this removes the core of the idea, the thing that makes it interesting. So that's no good.

I suggested that the protagonist could be so cripplingly indecisive that he makes all his urgent decisions based on a coin flip or dice toss, in which case you've got not a box, but a dice cup clamped down on top of the fateful roll; and as long as Indeterminate Teen doesn't lift the cup, both futures are happening. This spectacularly dysfunctional character quirk then becomes a major element in the story, though, and dictates the character arc.

One thing that occurs to me now is that the note could be intercepted by some third party with a stake in the communication, but it's hard to imagine what that stake could be or how it could justify holding onto the note.

Maybe this is soluble, but between us, we haven't cracked it yet.

Idea Garage Sale: Life in the Lab

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

Of course, the scientists will be just fine with that!

There's a line to walk here. The appeal of Mary Norton's Borrowers, and all the other little people out there, is their juxtaposition with our everyday lives. We love pins used as rapiers, climbing the drapes by the bobbles, safety pins and flyswatters transformed into mouse-proof gates, shooting the rapids in silverware boxes and teakettles, the whole nine yards.

But if the story begins in a lab, with the origin of the species, the environment isn't our domestic sphere turned into a wilderness of giants, but the kinds of buildings labs are found in. Vast, intimidating structures in research office facilities. And bio labs in particular are far from cozy. Security has to be high enough to challenge everything from microbes to apes. Temperature and humidity are tightly controlled. Everything runs off computers. The challenge of creating an independent society inside such a building is fundamentally different.

Especially since they couldn't be secret. Pod, Homily, and Arrietty survive partly by flying under the radar of us human beans. Even if the author can contrive some sort of reasonable excuse for their creators not having published their results and gotten in peer reviewers as fast as they could (and come on - you create tiny humans in your lab you can't wait to tell the world!), their creators know all about them, and will not be sanguine about letting them stroll off into the sunset. Careers are on the line here. The research potential is staggering. You don't just shrug and kiss all that good-by.

The number of ways this story can go wrong (i.e. boring and stupid) are staggering. If you give it the standard blockbuster treatment you'd have either evil scientists or evil homunculi in a race against time, finally climaxing in some kind of nonsensical explosion. The family movie treatment, with happy endings all round, wouldn't be any better.

The setup involves real, serious issues that can't be solved in the course of a book and which therefore would be uncomfortable to explore. If the homunculi are fully intelligent, moral creatures with agency, then even if they form a sympathetic family unit they will have conflicts among themselves, with different ideas about what constitutes their best interests. Their skills and their society will have to evolve in the context of their situation. They will have relationships with their creators, both positive and negative. They will be computer savvy (how else to get around all that security?) and at least some of them will be ingenious. They will be capable of abstract thought and be interested in the same sorts of questions we are, but their situation necessarily requires a different set of answers.

And, oh yeah - they'll have, to start out with, an unviable population size and access to research notes about how they were created...

I get tired just thinking about this one. And yet, the premise is so simple!

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.

Idea Garage Sale: Chronology

This is cheating, because I wrote this already, years ago. It was unsaleable, but I'm convinced there must be a way to do this right.

Comic book geek works out how time travel would function, and it's not all that hard once you grasp the principle. In fact, it's way too simple, and if ever commonly implemented would have a revolutionary effect on society, because time travel is also infinite space travel. Once you know how, you can get into your time machine and set it down anywhere and anywhen you like for about the same expenditure of energy.

So instead of going public, he experiments on his own, and supports his research by opening the world's best collector-oriented comic book store. The only people in the know are his wife, eventually his daughter, and the kid who sees his time machine materialize in the 1930s, who still lives in the neighborhood. Oh, and the bad guy, who also used to live in the neighborhood, who figures it out, steals the time machine, and finds he can't navigate. Bouncing around the universe and time eventually drives him mad.

But you tell this story in objective chronological order, as it happened according to the conventional calendar, not subjective order, as it was experienced by the characters. The protagonist appears at many different ages in relationship to the other characters and gives them information according to priorities that change depending on what part of the timeline he's from. It is possible for different versions of the time machine to materialize at the same time, so some scenes will overlap. The only way I could think to do that was to have two columns in those parts of the story, but that's hard to read and hell to revise. Each scene is dated and time stamped, with the author having to provide enough information in each to keep the audience on its toes without frustrating them into throwing the book across the room.

The weaknesses of the scenario are more obvious when I write them out in cold blood than they were at the time, when I was in love with the research and the concept. The objective chronological order thing was the big draw for me - I wanted desperately to make it work, and I'm still convinced it could. But it was really, really hard, and this storyline wasn't doing it.

I also now realize that if you're going to use a time machine for something as trivial as profiting from the collectibles market, your story should have a larger comic element than I was capable of at the time.

The practice in research and writing was excellent, anyway, and it pointed me in the direction I should go. I still like the fanboy protagonist and his tough-minded wife, who dealt with the practical and personal fallout of being married to the inventor of time travel with aplomb and resembled Clare of The Time Traveller's Wife not at all. The woman loved her husband a lot, but didn't have a conventionally romantic bone in her body. The character everybody else who saw this mess liked, though, was the kid from the 30s. I had no idea, prior to that time, that I had any skill in characterizing children. I'm still not sure why I should have that knack, unless it's that I remember my childhood more honestly than a lot of people.

Anyway, anybody who can figure out how to make this gimmick work has my blessing. I so want to see how you do it!

Idea Garage Sale: Runaway Clones

So there's this woman, a biologist, Cynthia, who is asexual and a little narcissistic but wants children and is really interested in reproductive science. So she clones herself.

This is illegal, but she has the resources to disguise it as a normal birth. She doesn't have a partner, but her company has good day care. When Diana, the kid, is about five she has advanced enough in her research and learned enough from raising her first child that she decides to have a second one, with modifications. Another five or six years on, she gets really ambitious and decides she's figured out how to clone herself but have a son. This time, perhaps because suspicions have been aroused at her company, perhaps because she's gotten overconfident, she is detected.

At this point she vanishes from the story, either going into hiding with her newly-implanted fetus or arrested and forced to abort. Officials arrive to take Diana and Selena into custody - their existence is illegal and they are to be used as evidence against their mother. But Diana realizes in time what's going down and escapes with her little sister.

What does she do now?

The sheer amount of world-building I'd have to do to write this intimidates me. It's one thing to build a fantasy world from scratch - I do that all the time - but a science fiction one has to be grounded in more hard science than I've ever absorbed. Light switches work by magic for all of me. I've read how Carbon 14 and Potassium-argon dating work dozens of time and there's a basic level at which I still don't understand them. Plus, this is the kind of plot it would be easy to take down the blockbuster road and turn into the sort of movie that bores me to tears.

But the characters intrigue me. In what ways are Cynthia, Diana, and Selena similar and in what ways are they different? How does Diana feel about being the "beta version" and how does this affect her relationship with the little sister she has to protect?

Is there, in this world, any such thing as a safe place for them? I think it's most interesting if it's relatively recent future and the girls' legal status is up for grabs; if there's a sizable portion of the population that considers them soulless abominations that can and should be put down. Even if not, if the act that led to your existence is illegal, how can society afford to make a place for you?

But the world-building involved - no, I can't face it. And I'm basically not in sympathy with anybody who wants to come up with new ways and means by which the world can be overpopulated, so I have a problem with Cynthia to begin with.