2009 story fragments
I didn't not write nearly as much this year, I was too busy to not do things.
But it's tradition now, so here are my 2009 unwritten stories.
"What just ate the baby?"; a field guide for expecting fathers.
Crush: Moore's Law meets the Heat Death of the Universe meets An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. As the universe contracts and the end of all things approaches, the ability to live a simulated life ever faster becomes important. An entity forks and divides itself as rapidly as possible in order to live as much love as it can.
Crunch: Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets the Book of Revelations; first episode; Why Not To Touch, in which a child Jesus reborn ignores the no touching sign in a Natural History Museum and is promptly eaten by a reanimate T-Rex.
TSA: A man breaks down walking through the airport as he begins to taste the overwhelming frustration and fear. He is rescued by the TSA, who reveal that they're actually there to protect the country from telepathic predatious monsters that feed off suffering in airports. Also, casinos.
Believe: Gods gain power from the belief of their faithful, so copyright is what keeps the zombie Disney gods from overwhelming.
Fermi's Sphinx: Berzerker meets an old man walking.
He: The life of a helium.
Repo Bear - A repo man for exotic animals is actually a werebear.
Repo Librarian - Reclaiming the library books of the dead.
Drift: A semi-self-aware gene transfer synthetic tRNA system escapes into the wild. Strange plecostomus/pidgeon hybrids clean the windows of skyscrapers, hermit crab DNA spreads to many unrelated species. Migratory herds of deer in orange highway construction barrels, cats in everything...wait, those are always like that. Neo-Lamarckism as an natural offshoot of biotechnology and steampunk.
Spongebob Squarepants and the Golden Ratio.
First Post Last Post - The day 4chan became selfaware, and met the old COBOL AIs already well entrenched. What's Singularity speak for "Get off my lawn!"?
The neo-Homerians. As data storage density grows, data storage lifetime falls. From stone to paper to discs to clouds, all the way back to telling the same story for three thousand years.
Vulcan: An alternate history in which Prometheus didn't bring fire because he died stopping Zeus from ending the fourth age of man, Hephaestus never got drunk, returned to Mt. Olympus or made Pandora, and technology came to man from him. Magma flows through pipes, heats buildings, cooks food and makes coffee, and magma plumbers are in demand.
Go Fish: A cross between Arsenic and Old Lace and Broken Arrow. Set in Palomares in 1966 when the US accidentally dropped 4 H-bombs on a Spanish fishing village, documenting the lives of a group of old ladies playing whatever the 1966 old lady in Spain equivalent of bridge would be, poisoning each other with plutonium for competitive advantage. I may just want to write this because the story of Simó Orts's bomb is so cool.
Adding on to last year's "Iron Lens" a bit about the Tybee bomb, which is still lost under the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics yachting competition.
Favorite quote: "He has on his wall at home a framed copy of Atomic Energy Commission form AL-569, revised 8-57, acknowledging his receipt on Feb. 4, 1958, of weapon serial number 47782.
The form provides him, prophetically, with an office to contact in case the bomb should somehow get lost."
How Stuff Should Work: Drinking a glass of water via orbital wellhead insertion bombardment.
Fly: A story about a shy young man developing a relationship with a girl who doesn't understand why he has so much trouble fitting in. A normal story of love and awkwardness, with a brief interlude in which the man goes on vacation with his father and they turn into eagles and spends the week plucking fish from the water, resting in trees and talking about whether or not he could be happy if he left the spirit world.
But it's tradition now, so here are my 2009 unwritten stories.
"What just ate the baby?"; a field guide for expecting fathers.
Crush: Moore's Law meets the Heat Death of the Universe meets An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. As the universe contracts and the end of all things approaches, the ability to live a simulated life ever faster becomes important. An entity forks and divides itself as rapidly as possible in order to live as much love as it can.
Crunch: Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets the Book of Revelations; first episode; Why Not To Touch, in which a child Jesus reborn ignores the no touching sign in a Natural History Museum and is promptly eaten by a reanimate T-Rex.
TSA: A man breaks down walking through the airport as he begins to taste the overwhelming frustration and fear. He is rescued by the TSA, who reveal that they're actually there to protect the country from telepathic predatious monsters that feed off suffering in airports. Also, casinos.
Believe: Gods gain power from the belief of their faithful, so copyright is what keeps the zombie Disney gods from overwhelming.
Fermi's Sphinx: Berzerker meets an old man walking.
He: The life of a helium.
Repo Bear - A repo man for exotic animals is actually a werebear.
Repo Librarian - Reclaiming the library books of the dead.
Drift: A semi-self-aware gene transfer synthetic tRNA system escapes into the wild. Strange plecostomus/pidgeon hybrids clean the windows of skyscrapers, hermit crab DNA spreads to many unrelated species. Migratory herds of deer in orange highway construction barrels, cats in everything...wait, those are always like that. Neo-Lamarckism as an natural offshoot of biotechnology and steampunk.
Spongebob Squarepants and the Golden Ratio.
First Post Last Post - The day 4chan became selfaware, and met the old COBOL AIs already well entrenched. What's Singularity speak for "Get off my lawn!"?
The neo-Homerians. As data storage density grows, data storage lifetime falls. From stone to paper to discs to clouds, all the way back to telling the same story for three thousand years.
Vulcan: An alternate history in which Prometheus didn't bring fire because he died stopping Zeus from ending the fourth age of man, Hephaestus never got drunk, returned to Mt. Olympus or made Pandora, and technology came to man from him. Magma flows through pipes, heats buildings, cooks food and makes coffee, and magma plumbers are in demand.
Go Fish: A cross between Arsenic and Old Lace and Broken Arrow. Set in Palomares in 1966 when the US accidentally dropped 4 H-bombs on a Spanish fishing village, documenting the lives of a group of old ladies playing whatever the 1966 old lady in Spain equivalent of bridge would be, poisoning each other with plutonium for competitive advantage. I may just want to write this because the story of Simó Orts's bomb is so cool.
Adding on to last year's "Iron Lens" a bit about the Tybee bomb, which is still lost under the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics yachting competition.
Favorite quote: "He has on his wall at home a framed copy of Atomic Energy Commission form AL-569, revised 8-57, acknowledging his receipt on Feb. 4, 1958, of weapon serial number 47782.
The form provides him, prophetically, with an office to contact in case the bomb should somehow get lost."
How Stuff Should Work: Drinking a glass of water via orbital wellhead insertion bombardment.
Fly: A story about a shy young man developing a relationship with a girl who doesn't understand why he has so much trouble fitting in. A normal story of love and awkwardness, with a brief interlude in which the man goes on vacation with his father and they turn into eagles and spends the week plucking fish from the water, resting in trees and talking about whether or not he could be happy if he left the spirit world.