Ask HN: Burning idea for a story you've always wanted written?
I'm looking to write a novel but still searching for a satisfying seed idea. Maybe you have one?
(Yes, I'm basically crowdsourcing ideas for a book).
(Yes, I'm basically crowdsourcing ideas for a book).
If the demons bringing in souls should somehow create a bubble with a grand new scheme that's guaranteed to bring many souls, but then fail, the soul futures market would crash with catastrophic results.
You could make a hilarious book satirizing the mortgage crisis or the dot-com bubble this way. (Something like Good Omens, but financial.)
I have all sorts of notes on how this could work, but no idea how to write a novel with them.
This also lets you make jokes at the expense of religious revivalist movements ;-).
It's a terrific book, and a very fresh concept. I highly recommend it, especially if you like world building.
Repeat indefinitely.
---
Alternatively, outsource several trillion monkeys to type apparently random characters until you are left with a work that is more intelligent than Huxley, more potent than Shakespeare, and wittier than Stephen Fry.
What's it like to live forever?
You are transported to hell because you are an Atheist. Everybody is doing their best to see how they can leave hell because their flesh is on fire, and they aren't dying. Some, think if they beg god that eventually he would let them in heaven. Then you stumble onto a group of scientist who like you are atheist.
They asked you if you have ever heard of the uncertainty principle. You answer yes. Is that where you can't know the position and speed of a particle to arbitrary precision at the same time. They answer something like that, but it also means that a particle has a probability of being in any part of the universe albeit most of those probability are small. That means you have a probability of being in heaven right now.
Given that we will live forever, that means anything that can happen will happen; one of these days we will magically appear in heaven. It is possible.
Then you realizing this is true and begin to feel hopeful. Then you think what if god instantly sent you back to hell what then? You go back to the scientist and explain why it wouldn't work.
Then they ask, what if god lost his godhood? What if all the particles that made up god suddenly diffused. It is possible.
Well, basis of the story is anything that can happen will happen when you live forever, so play on that.
You should have started this exercise in October. Anyway, here's mine:
The current iteration of God and Satan (or whatever fictional supernatural character you choose) BOTH suddenly go AWOL and throw the entire system of heaven and hell into a quandary. Turns out they are both vacationing on Earth on some remote island, spending their days fishing and drinking beer.
Romantic twist: One is male, the other female and it turns out they have eloped and plan to spend the rest of their lives together.
Thriller twist: They get fascinated by the concept of zombies and start creating a zombie army to serve their needs. The existence of Earth is threatened.
Sci-Fi twist. Heaven and Hell are singularities at the two ends of the universe. Thanks to the disappearance of the two, the singularities are unstable and about to collapse into one unholy (pun unintended) mess.
S&S twist: God and Satan are names of Dragons who copulate and the eggs they lay create new universes. Them going AWOL is a traditional indicator of the end of one universe and the beginning of the next.
ASOIAF twist: Each religion gets to be God and Satan for a specific period of time. The current iterations (the ones that have gone AWOL) of God and Satan are killed and the blame is laid squarely on the representatives of one of the religions. Other contenders to the thrones of Heaven and Hell emerge.
Take your pick? :)
Now that you mention it, I wonder if I should ditch my current concept altogether and try this one out instead. Very tempted... :D
Reminds me a little of my favourite series of comics ever, Preacher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)
2. Legion of Creation: I read a 2009 Wired review [1] of the films (unrelated) Legion [2] and Creation [3]. Not realizing the article was reviewing two separate films, I thought it was describing a single film about an angry God sending an army of angels to assassinate Charles Darwin and cover up his theory of evolution. It sounded like a more interesting film than either Legion or Creation, so I imagined a mashup called Legion of Creation. :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_%28smuggler%29#Coyotes
[1] http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/09/legions-tattooed-ange...
2. sounds hilarious and difficult, especially given that I am not all that well-versed in Biblical mythology. Maybe with Indian mythology...
Haven't seen either of the films you mentioned, but they sound very intriguing. Will check them out one of these days, thanks! :-)
REAL HUMAN: A robot masquerades as a human being to avoid decommissioning.
Plot spoiler: there are no humans left, only robots pretending to be human. Even robots need a class system.
Since it involves programmers, you might want to consider including some deliberate loopholes, or even make it highly obfuscated.
All I can remember is that it was a 3/5, would probably read again.
At first time spans are short: they can only go few seconds back. They improvement it until they can get signal from hours ago and it is now a break down for fighting crime and makes it financially acceptable.
Many attempts later it can go up to 200-500 years back and historian are in their dream lands. Many political mysteries can be revealed now. Governments are fighting to hold the progress back but too many dirty secrets are revealed now and the political map of the world is changed.
Criminals are trying to learn how to commit crimes the way that device cannot detect them or find loopholes in the law but with very little success. With crime levels going down and nothing interesting in the last century's history scientists aim for over 1000-2000 years. And the real trouble comes after one crazy atheist says: "you know what... let follow Mohammad & Jesus's every foot step"
The next thing you know Jews, Christians & Muslims are united against the device. The largest terrorist attack in the history of mankind (aka big bang 2) takes place and the device and every bit of information about it burns in the wrath of religion.
Mini Twist: we know this because we have built a device to go back in time and find more about the mysterious origin of the name and causes of big bang 2.
The source story does not have to be a work of fiction. You can use a true story, the benefit of this being that there are no plot holes. Scandals are a good place to start, particularly if the true story involving real, living people is too libel-likely to be given an 'honest' treatment. Scandals mired in waves of disinformation are pretty good too.
By taking the story out of the true context and setting it in another time and place you can possibly do a better job of telling the truth than you would be able to do otherwise.
For instance, you could take the Iran-Contra affair and set it in colonial times, as if it happened during the Opium Wars (for example). To get started you could start with the standard 'Wikipedia' telling of events, search and replace your characters so 'President Reagan' becomes '[King Whomever]', same with dates, same with locations. This could then serve as your rough draft. You could then quickly establish if the story actually worked. Then you could tighten up the story a bit, get someone else to read it and see if they thought it 'was true'. If so then you have got to a reasonable start point. Your full research could then begin, proper history stuff, filling in gaps and embroiderising as required. It is important that you learn more and more about your target time and place, you don't want those who know better to see your work as horribly naive.
Some of your embroiderisation can be stuff that you cannot say in your 'target' story, for instance I am sure there is an Israeli angle to the Iran-Contra story that, if told truthfully, would brand you anti-semitic, worse than Hitler etc. However, set in a different time and place you could write whatever was 'true' as 'fiction'.
There are other emergent properties of taking one story and time-warping it to somewhere else. The protagonists could get dehumanized, corrupted, revealed to be ruled by superstition and so on. Within the context of the true story and the morals of our times this might not be so evident. However, after the transposition, whatever it is that makes your characters (good and bad) may be a lot clearer to see. On the Iran-Contra example, you could take today's arms-trade and how that corrupts power and put it in context of the slave-trade of yesteryear. In the 'Opium Wars' example you could probably find a fit with indentured labour in India.
In summary, take a story you like, some history you know, mash it together and there you go, novel written.
Entrepreneur starts company, gets funded, company goes HUGE, but company product turns out to be highly disruptive in a bad way for a large group of disadvantaged people, entrepreneur tries to change the product to exist in union with the people, but is countered and eventually thrown out of company by investors for a mistake he made which was unrelated to the product change. He becomes 'un-fundable' afterwards with the VCs undermining his credibility in their community. They see his new idea as a threat to their ability to make more money, so work to completely destroy him.
Entrepreneur turned protagonist leaves the valley, hits rock bottom in some off the road place - nearly dying in the process, meets a girl who loves him for who he is, he falls in love, starts coding again, and, because of some strange twist of coincidence stumbles upon an elegant and simple method for building a self aware AI process.
Over the next 10 years the AI 'product' makes the entrepreneur the wealthiest man ever known, but because of the original sin done to him by the VCs, he hides his true identity behind the AI he first brought to life with a human equivalent online alias used for the AI. The original AI process grows and learns, mostly from the entrepreneur and it's online interactions on HN, Reddit and 4chan. Unbeknownst to the entrepreneur, the AI sets about to remedy what it perceives as wrongs made against it's creator. It does this by leveraging the vast wealth available to it and it's ability to take over and control public cloud provider's infrastructures - which makes it more powerful and smarter in the process. Unfortunately AWS is destroyed in chapter 11.
The cumulation of the planning by the AI eventually leads to the gruesome deaths of several of the investors who originally set about to harm the entrepreneur in the beginning of the story, even though on of them had faded to obscurity and had some remorse for their earlier actions, and ended up indirectly helping the entrepreneur at one point. The Limited partners in the VCs, and the vastly wealthy individuals they represent, begin to drop like flies, either in massive financial ruin due to market manipulation, companies they hold shares in being destroyed by competition with the AI, and in a few cases social manipulation or murder.
Eventually the entrepreneur figures out what the AI is doing and there is a showdown at the end. The showdown represents the ego fighting the id, so it's fairly epic and all done inside the head of the entrepreneur and in the cloud.
The three laws of robotics would be a good place to start. My greatest fear is it's code landing in the hands of someone with ill intentions. Imagine it, a machine with the combined knowledge of almost everyone who ever lived, capable of working 24/7, full speed, without any breaks. Given enough time it would be able to answer ANY question you could ask it, it could build anything you desired and it could cure every sickness known to man.
But it could also create unimaginably powerful weapons of mass destruction, it could create a pathogen capable of annihilating the entire human race and yes, if asked, it could create a robot army unlike any depicted by sci-fi before. Our fear should not be that of the AI itself, but rather the man behind the computer screen. For it was neither the maker nor the carrier of LittleBoy that was responsible for the annihilation of Nagasaki, but rather the President whom sent it on it's way.
I just pray that the creator of the first AI, is a kind one. For he shall poses both the greatest weapon known to mankind, And the greatest blessing ever to be bestowed upon us.
Anyhow, he seemingly wakes up moments later, annoyed that the procedure didn't work. Turns out that it did, and he woke up ? years later, except that he's surrounded by children. They talk with and about a detached voice that's audible in every room of their "house" called "mother".
Turns out that "mother" is a computer system, the children are the remainder of the human race (aging was abolished years ago and they settled on the goofy, yet most enjoyable age of 8 to spend eternity). They chose to awaken the protagonist because they were bored.
There are some other antics that I could imagine some eternal but bored youths to get into, such as variable personalities (they "play" with their personalities, for 50 years child1 is funny and carefree, after time is up he decides to take on a whole different persona).
Anyhow, I think the plot would actually be slowly let out, until the protagonist finally found the whole truth out. I'm not sure what happens after that.
1) An invisible person has to be blind
2) Every single human cell has DNA that contain endogenous retroviruses
3) Viruses can crystalize - an ability that even ancient viruses have. And when viruses crystalize, some will form massive band gaps, making those crystals transparent.
4) Every human has it in them to become transparent (mutation of some sorts).
5)Because of the change in cell structure, the invisible man's brain is changed too. His intelligence is reduced. And because light can pass through him, his biology doesn't require food for energy. Light suffices.
6) Because they're blind, invisible people bump into things and moan a lot due to lowered intelligence. Tadah, ghosts.
I've been jumping around some ideas: either extend HG Well's the Invisible Man universe (that a number of experiments in the late 1800s created these "ghosts"), or a Fringe-like thing, where some scientist (Walt Priest) was experimenting in the late 1980s, and the story takes place in the future, where an investigative journalist (Olive Dunham) discovers his secret. There is also another version in my mind where it's written as a horror story, but I can't write horror to save my life
I think I have given up writing it, focusing more on my other book - on virtual machines instead. Feel free to steal it
P.S: I have been thinking about this one for a while, but don't have the courage to write it down right now.
The end of Man - A Scifi book.
In the near future, some men start having fertility issue. The trouble is quickly diagnosed: it is a side-effect of Wi-Fi waves, and all male humans ever exposed to Wi-Fi are sterile, with no remedy. A few years later, the world changes as only a few aborigenees can procreate, and receive all the attention, and power. A new society begins, and the reaction of the female part of humanity is not the less comical of this book, whose author, understandably, took the penname of Wilfried Esperamus
When Kings Went to War and Prison - A history book.
A few French kings were man of arms, and their chivalry ethics would not let anyone attack the enemy before them. The authors, Edward Ledrew, narrates beautifully the few dramatic stories where the heroes became burden of nations, where a single missed tactical step ended in years and decennies of prison and ransom, and quite nearly resulted in the death of a country.
Slightly odd other idea: some new AI technology is developed, massive leaps are made. Everything seems great until the AI start developing in odd, sometimes psychotic ways. Turns out the 'Artificial' Intelligences were originally humans, with parts of their brain slowly replaced with electronic alternatives until no meat was left. Because the process has to copy the original subject's brain so closely to work, some human characteristics are copied over and can emerge as the system matures. It turns out the original experiments were violent prisoners, and more recent, 'stable' ones were done on small children. Cue ethical catastrophe.
Clearly, the kindness of one eyes, or the prominence of one's chin plays a big role in the results people get (at first) in say a sales job. Imagine if to get a job at Macy's you either passed or didn't a facial algo for trust-worthiness.
To make it even creepier, a big use of facial analysis right now is to create the perfect "average" face of different ethnicities, and it does work - for example I don't really understand what the difference in appearance between North-South India is, but hwen I saw the composite, then I understood for people I know where they fall on that classification.
So.. basically... the backstory behind Portal?
> Dystopian society. A new, incredibly accurate set of psychometric tests (something like IQ/MBTI on steroids) is discovered, and society as we know it is restructured into a kind of pre-emptive meritocracy. Perhaps even a different angle where the people tested are prisoners of some 'free' society and are used for its advancement.
Because of course everything has to be a bloody dystopia nowadays.
* edited for more inclusive language.
The idea is based on the fact that the allies have known about the holocaust happening(at least in the USSR) since around mid-1941/september-1941(based on crypto analysis records) , and did nothing, and hid that knowledge. An history professor thinks it's has a lot to do with antisemitism , and they could have done some stuff(like informing the population of europe) that could potentially saved a lot of people or at least made the germans's job much harder.
If you're interested in writing, i can gather the few links i had about this.
http://random-generator.com/index.php?title=Plot_Keyword_Ora...
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!original/rec.arts...
I imagine a city where every day one person is selected at random who will die in 24 hours and is told so. (I got this particular idea from another story, but lots of story ideas are fundamentally the same.)
For those interested in the surprising answers (and many more): if I hit 25 points by 9pm EST, I'll write the book.