Oh, science fiction.
I've had a spare universe rattling around in my brain for quite a few years now. If you follow me on Tumblr, you've heard me refer to it as the Catalyst!verse -- it's mostly been a mental sandbox, a place to file cool aliens and space pirates and exobiology and other original sci-fi stuff. I've done a lot of worldbuilding with it and have developed a handful of really neat characters, but the problem is that I never really had a story to go along with them.
Last year around finals week (it's always finals week, isn't it) I had a story idea blindside me -- I was thinking about space operas and the roles of characters in them, and how dangerous it would be to find yourself acting as the mentor figure to somebody who the universe has dubbed a Protagonist: more often than not, in order for them to complete their Hero's Journey, their mentor figure will wind up dead. And I thought about retelling a Hero's Journey Space Opera Story from the perspective of a mentor figure who is all too aware of his impending doom but is powerless to stop the narrative from unfolding as it will, and is not very happy about it.
And I thought, wow, this is interesting, we could try for some experimental meta space opera thing and finally put the Catalyst!verse to work! I already had a cast of characters I could easily fit into the necessary archetypal roles if I pruned some of their characteristics a bit. I had a bunch of alien cultures, a couple of worlds for my crew to run around on, and all the raw materials that only needed a plot to go launching off somewhere really interesting.
The problem with this meta idea is that it needs to have an element of campiness in order to work properly, and I fear the Catalyst!verse is a universe that wants to be taken a little more seriously. I've poured an unbelievable amount of research into the biology, ecology, and cultures involved in my little sandbox universe, and the entire idea is to make this stuff plausible. I'm a science person, after all, and this is how I have my fun. I don't want to take all my work, deliberately make it cliche, and deconstruct it again.
So now I'm stuck. I've re-written half my characters to make them fit the meta story and put a fair bit of thought into arranging how a universe where people were aware of the tropes controlling their lives would work. I like a lot of what I have and want to go forward with it -- sort of. Because I'm afraid that going with the meta version would reduce years of worldbuilding to a joke. But if I don't go with it, I don't really have a story anymore and we're back where we started -- a sandbox with no plot.
*flops over*
Last year around finals week (it's always finals week, isn't it) I had a story idea blindside me -- I was thinking about space operas and the roles of characters in them, and how dangerous it would be to find yourself acting as the mentor figure to somebody who the universe has dubbed a Protagonist: more often than not, in order for them to complete their Hero's Journey, their mentor figure will wind up dead. And I thought about retelling a Hero's Journey Space Opera Story from the perspective of a mentor figure who is all too aware of his impending doom but is powerless to stop the narrative from unfolding as it will, and is not very happy about it.
And I thought, wow, this is interesting, we could try for some experimental meta space opera thing and finally put the Catalyst!verse to work! I already had a cast of characters I could easily fit into the necessary archetypal roles if I pruned some of their characteristics a bit. I had a bunch of alien cultures, a couple of worlds for my crew to run around on, and all the raw materials that only needed a plot to go launching off somewhere really interesting.
The problem with this meta idea is that it needs to have an element of campiness in order to work properly, and I fear the Catalyst!verse is a universe that wants to be taken a little more seriously. I've poured an unbelievable amount of research into the biology, ecology, and cultures involved in my little sandbox universe, and the entire idea is to make this stuff plausible. I'm a science person, after all, and this is how I have my fun. I don't want to take all my work, deliberately make it cliche, and deconstruct it again.
So now I'm stuck. I've re-written half my characters to make them fit the meta story and put a fair bit of thought into arranging how a universe where people were aware of the tropes controlling their lives would work. I like a lot of what I have and want to go forward with it -- sort of. Because I'm afraid that going with the meta version would reduce years of worldbuilding to a joke. But if I don't go with it, I don't really have a story anymore and we're back where we started -- a sandbox with no plot.
*flops over*