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I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog.

Potential Novel/Short Story Ideas

Posted: May 3, 2016

I have been working on a couple of really interesting, but fairly incomplete projects for the past few weeks. Nothing is at a point where I can sing its praises publically. As a result, I haven’t been writing much, beyond my own personal notes and journaling. I want to change that. Here are a number of ideas that I could turn in to novels or short stories.

  1. General Purpose computers, and information about them, were outlawed by DRM legislation. All that is left are crippled, broken, spyware infested machines. The internet is dead, and everyone has switched back to mainly mechanical devices. Many years later, a highschool student finds some old textbooks on early computers in an antique store. She builds a new internet.

  2. Jortine is a young barbarian, raised by a horde of Barbarian Warriors of the highest order. Jortine is different, in that he doesn’t like killing or maiming, and is generally kind of a Dork. He develops an aptitude for Magic.

  3. Did you ever read the Dragonriders of Pern? It was this series where some people could communicate telepathically with genetically engineered, giant, flying, firebreathing lizards. Something about the idea of telepathic dragons seems like it should be scarrier than it was in the Pern novels. I’d love to see a series in which various Kaiju and other large, scary beasts, are revealed to be intellegent by way of telepathic communication.

  4. Pokémon, but with North American Cryptids. (Gotta catch ‘em all.)

  5. Personal journal of a tinker gnome who is pretending to be a wizard, but isn’t one.

  6. Old West + Magic + Standard “You must get the crystal” quest

  7. Old West + Ratchet and Clank/Jack and Daxter

  8. Kids raised on a spaceship making planetfall for the first time

  9. Human built robot companions running a cargo-cult of human society after we’ve all gone

  10. Twentyish year old woman stationed on distant planet, more or less alone (she has robots, she checks in with her COs via vidscreen) discovers reason planet was abandonded.

  11. Thomas Edison was a dark wizard.

  12. Kid runs away from home, in a spaceship.

  13. Yakimbo/A Fist Full of Dollars + Prohibition US

  14. Space Patrol/Tom Corbet Space Cadet homage, by way of Battle Star Galactica

  15. Urban fantasy. Magic is demonological in nature.


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