Writing original SF concept, an impossibility?

Writers Block....

Aliens, time travel, robots, alternate realities, near future, far future, colonization, cloning, evolution, nano,.

WHAT HASN'T BEEN DONE!!!!!

 

Yeah, i know, there's more than SF.


But nothing else is so much fun.

 

artificial intelligence. though its also been done....

i saw something on tv a while ago, where scientists were creating electronic receptors to interact with the human brain. infact, they were finding that they could grow braincells onto those receptors, and would then try to integrate it with the brain, and use it for people whove been brain damaged to regain some of their functionality.

when i saw this, i immediately thought of what impact it could have on ai
having human brains working with machines, perhaps eventually ending up for millitary use. maybe have a government which is "drafting" people to steal their brains to use for their death machines, for which the population is revolting. i dunno

feel free to steal my idea. ill never get around to using it

 

When I finally get round to doing so, I was going to write something about the future of the gaming industry; about a game-writer who's finding his games are being played out in real life or something. It's only a rough idea.

I've been meaning to do SF, but I tend to not want to write it. I'd rather write more "conventional" stories in an SF setting, rather than blind people with science and try to get away with not having decent plots, characters etc.

 

The paraphase my lecturer.....
"Every idea has already been done, what's new and what people want to read, is the way you present that idea, your unique voice."

I like reading SF, but get so overwhelmed by the technological stuff that writing it would entail that I've done written any. Kudos to those who manage it though.

 

It has been asseted that there are only 101 possible plots. What if there was a story about a young writer that found number 102?

 

I'd say there's probably less than that.

Just steal a Shakespeare play and set it in space or something.

 

La practica hace al maestro

 

Hey man, its all be said before. But its all in how you say it and how you view a certain topic, like love is one of the most written topics, but yet there are thousands of ways in which to write about it, and if you got a block, just chill man, just try some other form of writing or art, and you will again will find inspiration.

Good luck to you and your writing!

 

Inter-Dimensional travel as easy as stepping through a doorway.

 

I don't understand, how are there only 101 plots?

Could you elaborate on that?

 

Self-Fulfilling phrophesy has been done to DEATH!

 

There won't necessarily be original concepts, but the big thing with sci-fi when it was original was that it was raising ethical questions. So if you can pose new questions about old concepts, that's as good as anything.

 

Hmm, should I go with
"But soft, what light through yonder transdimensional-borgportal breaks?
'Tis the east, and JXQ-15L is the sun..."
or
"By the pricking of my cybergenetic pincers,
Something wicked this way meanders..."

 

Asteroidal lichen by any other name would smell as gross.

 

Oh, yeah, small word of warning on the subject of sci-fi: think really hard before trying to invent the slang or youth culture of the future. It's really easy to look daft like that.

 

Projecting the possible impact of these things on our society--there is an infinite number of possibilities.

 

True, but at the same time, the reason books like Nineteen-Eighty-Four work so well is because they don't project anything particularly surprising or unusual. As a projection of "current" events onto the future, that book is pretty fucking devastating in its plausibility and/or accuracy. The trick is to be if not pessimistic then at least very aware of human nature and the drives that lead things to change or - more often - to stay the same.

 

Amen. Therein lies the biggest error that differentiates credible "science fiction" from dopey "scifi". Historically speaking, people & human nature haven't changed all that much. So why would the future be any different? True, our clothes change, and our cities change, but it's not like we suddenly become perfect, utopian beings in a society where "war was abolished in the year 21--". And similarly, I doubt we'll all become vicious, murderous killers in a post-apocalyptic world. Those are two clichés that really kill me.

 

Quite. That's why I find Star Trek so weird to watch. People have been going out and getting drunk and then coming home and having crap sex and throwing up for centuries, and I'm seriously supposed to believe that in another couple of centuries they'll all be content to play chess? No-one even takes a shit in that show. You'd think in five different shows, over about 1000 episodes, it would've come up once.

The other thing I've found hard to believe is that we'll all understand quantum mechanics and so on, when at the moment most people (myself included) don't even know how a bicycle works.