For starters, I am about to find out just how annoying brackets are mid sentence...
I like stories that have something subtle to teach the reader or otherwise give the reader food for thought, something that the reader may have never thought of before. I initially got my primary idea a year or two ago as a sort of "Hazards and potential pitfalls of technological advancement as perceived by a common person (compared to one who has to deal with it on a daily basis)" with the idea of showing off some of the potentially brilliant upcoming/growing technologies with some unintended hidden negative side effects of such things. This was going to be a short story based around a small group (2-4 people) losing something of importance to them/one of them and trying to get it back. The item could have been anything but, due to the nature of the item or local neighbourhood, the local police could not/would not be involved. The item need not necessarily be illegal, though that could have added to the story in terms of drama and tension in the neighbourhood, as it could have been something of small value or of only personal value that would be a low priority for the local constabulary. Set in the near future, obviously, the crew would find some form of video footage showing a vehicle making a rapid getaway, perhaps in a quiet street or an alley way. This will then lead to the crew going door knocking/beat down some doors (depending on neighbourhood type), only to find out that no one had heard (or "no one had heard" in the gritty scenario) the vehicle get away. As it would turn out later, either by finding the culprit or (more likely) by leap-of-logic realisation, the vehicle used was an electric vehicle (electric vehicles are quieter than combustion engine counterparts to the point that they are currently manufacturing specific sounds for electric vehicles moving at low speeds to warn pedestrians, especially vision impaired pedestrians, that the vehicles are approaching).
Oooh, just thought of this: Perhaps the crew witnessed, via security camera, some form of crime committed by another mutual friend and are trying to hush it up and/or investigate it themselves before getting the police in on it. This requires further thought....
Anyhew, possibly a car chase of some description ensues. Somewhere along the line, someone's (i.e. antagonist or protagonist) car gets hacked because that can actually happen now, let alone with new devices yet to be invented (look at #3, specifically). Or maybe the protagonist's vehicle gets hijacked by means unknown, leading to a near-death experience. Point is: Vehicular shenanigans due to inherent security flaws in vehicle design.
Antagonist gets away but somehow is now capable of being tracked via mobile device (why the don't do this earlier, I can't think of at the moment. Perhaps the chase confirms protagonist suspicions, allowing them to delve deeper and find the mobile number of the suspect? Let's run with that for the time being). Perhaps antagonist gets away again by losing the mobile phone, forcing the crew to resort to less technological ways of tracking.
That final part of the story arc was somewhat inspired as an inversion to a documentary from a British guy trying to evade a group, that specialises in tracking people down, by going completely "off the grid" (i.e. No Mobile, no phone, no internet, no ATM transactions, try to dodge all cameras). He eventually got "captured" about 70 days later (running off memory here, could be wrong), after hiding out in the British Countryside and ended up requiring mild psychiatric counselling afterwards for paranoia. Good times, thanks Steve :)
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As you can see, it sort of evolved from a short story to a potential novel length piece. I was considering doing it last year or two... but my complete lack of recent experience with writing (last big typing and writing were from pre-2010, when I used to be an internet junkie) and time constraints over the past two years meant that it had been put to the back of my mind indefinitely. I'd come back to the idea and modify it every now and then, and I am fairly sure some of the above wasn't near my last thought-revision of the idea, but it's always been there. My only issue with it was that I wasn't really sure of whether I could pad it out for the full 50K words. I'm good at padding, but probably not that good.... though, after writing out that basic synopsis, perhaps it could work.However, that would mean the more disturbing/gritty approach following would not be included.
I am going to freely admit that I am not actually all that creative, or at least I don't think so. Many many many times in my past, particularly throughout highschool but not limited to then, I take things from other sources to manipulate in my own way. Actually, "take" is too weak a word. "Steal", "Pirate" and "semi-plagiarize" are probably closer, though my English teachers would probably call it closer to "appropriate".
In short, I took storylines, imagery and similar things and either wrote them into whatever I was working on or outright twist it directly to fit my means. I worked on the principal of "Talent Borrows, Genius Steals", a phrase that I first found from the now defunct graphic design company "The Designer's Republic" but I have since found to be a witticism attributed to Oscar Wilde. I'd call that ironic if I didn't want to get in to a debate as to what constituted "irony" (I've had my yearly dose of "irony" courtesy of the hipsters in Yahtzee Croshaw's Jam).
I'm going to stick with "appropriation" until proven otherwise... if only because I generally broke my things far enough away from the originals to make them somewhat unique, similar to Weird Al Yankovich's music. You'll probably see some of those stories later on as I go back to them to expand and (hopefully) improve upon them as practice. You can be the judge then.
Anyhew... My current addition to the above story involves ideas contained within this article by Yahtzee Croshaw (I promise, I am not in fanboy love with him/his works... this just happened to be a thought provoking article and he just happened to have two books out when I was on a book binge). Gamers, I urge you to read the article for an idea of a unique gameplaying experience.
If you haven't/don't want to read it, the article synopsis goes something like this:
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It is the near future. It's far enough ahead to have cybernetic enhancements as a common enough thing that Joe Consumer will have them and they are just advanced enough to have near-seamless interfacing with non-cybernetic or human constructs (i.e. you could plug yourself directly in to a system and experience perceptions based on what that system feeds you). You find yourself marooned in the ocean but come across a cruise liner. You get on board and realise it is eerily quiet. While attempting to cyber-interface with the ships computer, something happens and you lose the use of your eyes. You realise, however, that you have access to the ship's closed circuit security cameras. From here, you can use the CCTV as your "eyes". This is a little disorienting at first, because your "eyes" are not attached to your body and so you have to constantly re-orient yourself to what the ships cameras are seeing and adjust your body movements accordingly. For example, a view from one camera may have you going "up" a hallway. As you make your way out of that camera's vision, you swap your point of view to the next camera's vision... only, because this one is oriented differently, you now look as if you are moving across the screen (rather than up/down). This can cause frustration early on as you have to adjust which camera you are looking from as well as the direction and orientation of your body constantly changing whilst still using the directional movements for the body. Direct quote:"Thus the game turns into a fixed-camera survival horror game like the early Resident Evils, albeit with a twist: you still use first person movement controls from the perspective of your actual body, pressing up on the controller to move forward, etc., and hear the game's audio as you would from your actual physical ears."
Eventually, you find clues as to the various horrors that have struck the cruise ship and work from there... possibly a computer virus that affect cybernetic implanted people by changing their perception of the world around them.
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Remember that bit at the beginning of this blog post where I said I like stories that give the reader something subtle to think about? Think about a cybernetic human interface that could be manipulated from external sources, like Yahtzee's game idea above... Imagine a future where people could be shut down or turned insane by not having a sufficiently good computer virus filter...Now... It must be said that I am 50-50 about the cyberpunk genre. Whilst the whole idea of enhanced humans via cybernetic implants make me squee on account of Human/Machine hybrids and personalised internal HUDs, it also seems like a fantastically stupid thing to do (personally, I don't like the idea of surgery when you are healthy). Also seamless interfacing seems just too... unrealistic, in my opinion. Too many variables that possibly can not be controlled or regulated.
Deus Ex had a damn good crack at cyberpunk. Blade Runner and The Matrix were also pretty good. William Shatner's Tekwar (or at least the TV series, I've not read the books) was... a lesson in how bad 90s TV got, I suppose. William Gibson's Neuromancer series is an excellent way of how to simultaneously do it and not do it (from my perspective). Whilst I found the whole "connect to the internet and almost literally live there" thing a little overblown and a lot of the stuff is very dated (the height of technology being 1MB hard drives), the basis of how it all worked was pretty damn cool (especially considering the time he wrote it, before mainstream internet). Version 43 by Phillip Palmer was a good way to mix it up too although, again being a little too far fetched in places... but maybe that's where I am going wrong:
Where I try to envision something that might be within the possible realms of reality, they are are doing fantastically amazing things, like literally battling a corporation's internet security walls with a VR dragon (Neuromancer), having people upload their mind for transfer or use later (the Neuromancer series, as well as Version 43) or having an interstellar police cyborg deal with criminals who utilise quantum mechanical weapons to devastate a population (Version 43)... and all of those are damn good stories to read, if you haven't already. They are definitely having fun with the more extreme end results of cybernetics.
Perhaps I just prefer my Sci-Fi a little harder and more grounded in something that could approach reality.
That said, I can see potential in my approach to it. In many ways, I'm doing the same thing that Robert Brockway (of Cracked fame) did when he started his serialized novel Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity: I see science fiction and, though I like it, I see nothing that I personally really like... so perhaps I should just make my own. The best reason for anything, really.
Something must also be said for Yahtzee's choice of location.
Direct quotes from the article:
"The choice of setting was down to my feeling that ships at sea, with their isolated setting and cramped internal environments, are a natural setting for survival horror. While there have been many games with sections on ships, they tend to more commonly be military or merchant ships, not that different to the endemic industrial environments games throw us into all the time. A luxury ship, with its once opulent trappings brought to ruin and decay by its residents giving into their base instincts, would create a nice juxtaposition of horror against a warm, welcoming environment. Bioshock and to a lesser extent Dead Space 2 would go on to do this sort of thing quite effectively.
Also, when I took my Pacific cruise a year or two back, I remember being fascinated by the hallway just outside my cabin door. It was incredibly narrow with a low ceiling but extended from one end of the ship to the other, so you could stand right in the middle and it would seem to stretch infinitely in both directions, a regular pattern of doors, carpet and ceiling lights. It somewhat reminded me of how the hotel interiors were shot in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and the potential for scares and atmosphere building hung thickly in the air."
Now, given that my story was set in some form of city and his is on a boat, there must be some form of transition or other form of concession made to location. This brought me back to a Cracked article from this time last year: The 6 Most Mind Blowing Modern Ghost Towns.
These aren't places like the townships of dead mining towns similar to the ones littering the Western Australian landscape. These are massive constructions that have been left abandoned for various reasons. The following are on that list:
- An abandoned Theme Park bigger than anything currently operational in Asia
- A man-made archipelago that is slowly fading away
- An Underground Rail Network abandoned
- North America's largest (and largely disused) Airport
- The World's largest shopping mall (in a city that was too small to support it)
- A particle accelerator 3 times larger than the Large Hadron Collider (that was underfunded and then abandoned)
With those above, or something similar, I could comfortably merge the two stories (mine, and the idea from Yahtzee Croshaw).
My current working storyline is something like this:
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Person with cybernetic enhancement loses something. Gets assistance from friends.Checks some form of CCTV to find someone trying to get away (see electric car notation).
Can't figure out who it is until they realise that technology can help them find the culprit.
After a near miss at retrieving Cyberperson's McGuffin, Cyberperson gets a fresh lead and follows it up alone.
Enters abandoned place.
Cyber Shenanigans happen.
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Obviously, there are more details than that in my head... but that is the gist.There are other things, like what sort of Cyber Shenanigans happen and who/what causes it (this part is currently a case of "what is the least overused cliche"....) as well as the specific situations, locations and so on....
But that's the current state of play.
Later on, I'll add things in, like specific city/town issues, takes on the global economy/issues of the time (specifically, is the society "Post Scarcity" for most things? Do people still work in many industries, or have they been replaced by automations? Would Artificial Intelligence be around by that time?)
It's currently 20 past 11 at night. I started typing this post at about 8:30pm after doing "research" (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it :P ) on various things, from future technology analysis to solar electric car history to Google Glasses and current Bionic Eye technology, for a few more hours before that. Good times, good blog :)
3 hours of typing for two and a half thousand words.
Damn I'm feeling good. And tired. And work/call tomorrow.
Whoops.
Totally worth it (until I re-read this tomorrow and find all of the mistakes I've written in and not proof-read to correct...)
(also, what is it with Blogger being so hard to get along with? It fails to save my stuff half of the time, and similarly won't allow me to preview... also, it has a bad habit of misformatting everything...)
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