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Ask HN: Burning idea for a story you've always wanted written?
I'm looking to write a novel but still searching for a satisfying seed idea. Maybe you have one?
(Yes, I'm basically crowdsourcing ideas for a book).
- vezycash 13y agoA world where nikola tesla has business acumen
- ohjeez 13y agoAn alternate history in which Bill Gates is killed in a car accident in Albuquerque back when Microsoft is just getting started. What would the computer industry have looked like?
- sarreph 13y agoA book about a guy who crowdsources idea for a book, and ultimately decides that the story will be about a guy crowdsourcing ideas for a book. Repeat indefinitely. --- Alternatively, outsource several trillion monkeys to type apparently random characters until you are left with a work that is more intelligent than Huxley, more potent than Shakespeare, and wittier than Stephen Fry.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- IvyMike 13y agoAn alternate history where smallpox does not exist in Europe, and instead travels from the new world back to Europe. Thus the Inca empire is never destroyed and the Americas are never colonized.
- ohjeez 13y agoI want to read that one!
- bsenftner 13y agoFirst person narrative of a modern day man with innate knowledge that he is in fact the "Son of God" (Jesus) and that the modern Judeo-Christian religions are man made creations. The story is the Christ story, but placed now, the tone is like Kafka, with not necessarily the expected outcome we are familiar.
- DjangoReinhardt 13y agoI think there's a book by Ashwin Sanghi called the "Rozabal Line" that is on these same ideas. Read it a while back, so I'm not sure. All I can remember is that it was a 3/5, would probably read again.
- dandrews 13y agoSee also: The Man from Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAarR4tVEHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAarR4tVEHU
- capnrefsmmat 13y agoImagine if Hell were a sort of financial market. Demons trade soul futures, essentially betting on the future price of souls, which of course they consume for food. Other demons (backed by investors) devise new schemes to tempt humans into mortal sin. Failure means the souls go to Heaven, not Hell. If the demons bringing in souls should somehow create a bubble with a grand new scheme that's guaranteed to bring many souls, but then fail, the soul futures market would crash with catastrophic results. You could make a hilarious book satirizing the mortgage crisis or the dot-com bubble this way. (Something like Good Omens, but financial.) I have all sorts of notes on how this could work, but no idea how to write a novel with them.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoThis sounds absolutely hysterical! I think your main character(s) should be demons who work for the Hell SEC, who are trying to fight their way through corruption and bureaucracy to stop the bubble before it's too late and a huge quantity of souls are lost to the vile clutches of God in Heaven.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- capnrefsmmat 13y agoThat sounds great. My problem is that I can't think of a good cause for a soul bubble in hell. It'd be good to tie it to some historical event, but what could I say was clearly a failed demonic soul investment scheme?
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoWhy would there be a soul bubble? Well maybe an outbreak of religious revivalism on Earth has restricted the supply of souls available for Hell's consumption. Oh, and some new processing method is making certain demons very rich and pumping too much capital into a market that's fundamentally supply-limited. This also lets you make jokes at the expense of religious revivalist movements ;-).
- malabar 13y agoa story about some jackass that stole my laptop from my apartment. when I track the laptop down he had upgraded the memory, larger hdd and upgraded from windows to linux. he also left a bunch of pics of him and my girlfriend having "fun". So i lost my girlfriend, but I got a kick ass laptop.
- NAFV_P 13y agoA bunch of HN hackers collaborate in solving a heinous murder. Rather than writing it in "novel" form, just post it directly on HN in many parts. You could leave clues lying around in certain articles of your own, or even include real articles and incorporate it into the story. Since it involves programmers, you might want to consider including some deliberate loopholes, or even make it highly obfuscated.
- pesenti 13y agoA book about a security analyst/encryption specialist who finds messages deep inside natural sequences of numbers (like pi's decimals).
- auerc 13y agoA group of scientists find undeniable proof that multiple deities exist in the universe, a story of what becomes of all the worlds religions as a result. I find it interesting to think how the worlds religions would react to such a discovery . Would they throw away their previous believe systems?
- contextual 13y agoHidden Bible verses and what they mean. Why King David was a sadistic mass murderer, the real story behind Paul and the "Super Apostles", why Jesus was likely learned in Buddhism and what His name I AM THAT I AM means... all supported by scripture. For those interested in the surprising answers (and many more): if I hit 25 points by 9pm EST, I'll write the book.
- realrocker 13y agoTragedy hits a genius scientist when his family of(wife and two kids) is attacked by a gang of young men with high up political connections. His wife is killed on spot. His children later kidnapped and murdered from a location supposedly protected by the police. The entrenched corruption in the government has removed all hopes of justice. A life long pacifist, he won't succumb to violence still so he takes to the ultimate protest sit down of all time. Unknown to all the scientist had invented a super strong indestructible alloy. He creates a faceless armor out of the alloy and a very long chain. In the middle of the night He sneaks into the national monument campus with the help of his other scientist friends and drills down the chain miles into earth. And binds himself to the armor and the chain. The armor can keep him alive indefinitely but it can't be destroyed. The genius scientist is irremovable from his protest and the whole world is watching. GO! P.S: I have been thinking about this one for a while, but don't have the courage to write it down right now.
- brandonhsiao 13y agoI've always been fascinated by (or scared of) the concepts of those moments before you die. What must it feel like being led up to the electric chair, or held at gunpoint? What would your thoughts be, knowing you'd soon stop existing (or go wherever you believe dead people go)? I imagine a city where every day one person is selected at random who will die in 24 hours and is told so. (I got this particular idea from another story, but lots of story ideas are fundamentally the same.)
- monsterix 13y agoA close account of how the world/nations/family/people would look only 50 years from now? - post oil, post-anything that's supposed to die and with whatever that's supposed to be adopted.
- amerika_blog 13y agoAldous Huxley beat you to it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- monsterix 13y agoRe-re-visited in a more number-crunching way? :-)
- kahoon 13y agoIt is 120K years AD. Humanity has suffered 53 nuclear holocausts (this was made possible by advanced recovery methods researched over time). Peace for 18000 years is being upheld by an artificial intelligence which governs a flying city, eradicating advanced human settlements which threaten to develop into nuclear threats. A group of cavern dwelling humans aim to destroy this flying city by detonating a hydrogen bomb at the right place at the right time.
- cpeterso 13y agoRelated: Zardoz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz
- hluska 13y agoI've always been drawn to a world in which neural implants are so widespread that they begin to attract malware developers. Seems to me that when humanity's age old enemy (the virus) crosses the human/machine divide, some interesting (and not entirely pleasant) things will happen. * edited for more inclusive language.
- ksrm 13y ago"Your children's minds have been encrypted with RSA-2048. To retrieve the private key send $300 to the following Bitcoin address..."
- jaxbot 13y agoFahrenheit 451 /pun
- contextual 13y agoAnother idea: a book on why animals are people, and what the future might look like when animals have a charter of rights and freedoms.
- DjangoReinhardt 13y agoPlanet of the Apes?
- Theodores 13y agoYou will have a lot of fun taking one story and transposing it to a different time and place, as per 'Heart of Darkness' and 'Apocalypse Now'. The source story does not have to be a work of fiction. You can use a true story, the benefit of this being that there are no plot holes. Scandals are a good place to start, particularly if the true story involving real, living people is too libel-likely to be given an 'honest' treatment. Scandals mired in waves of disinformation are pretty good too. By taking the story out of the true context and setting it in another time and place you can possibly do a better job of telling the truth than you would be able to do otherwise. For instance, you could take the Iran-Contra affair and set it in colonial times, as if it happened during the Opium Wars (for example). To get started you could start with the standard 'Wikipedia' telling of events, search and replace your characters so 'President Reagan' becomes '[King Whomever]', same with dates, same with locations. This could then serve as your rough draft. You could then quickly establish if the story actually worked. Then you could tighten up the story a bit, get someone else to read it and see if they thought it 'was true'. If so then you have got to a reasonable start point. Your full research could then begin, proper history stuff, filling in gaps and embroiderising as required. It is important that you learn more and more about your target time and place, you don't want those who know better to see your work as horribly naive. Some of your embroiderisation can be stuff that you cannot say in your 'target' story, for instance I am sure there is an Israeli angle to the Iran-Contra story that, if told truthfully, would brand you anti-semitic, worse than Hitler etc. However, set in a different time and place you could write whatever was 'true' as 'fiction'. There are other emergent properties of taking one story and time-warping it to somewhere else. The protagonists could get dehumanized, corrupted, revealed to be ruled by superstition and so on. Within the context of the true story and the morals of our times this might not be so evident. However, after the transposition, whatever it is that makes your characters (good and bad) may be a lot clearer to see. On the Iran-Contra example, you could take today's arms-trade and how that corrupts power and put it in context of the slave-trade of yesteryear. In the 'Opium Wars' example you could probably find a fit with indentured labour in India. In summary, take a story you like, some history you know, mash it together and there you go, novel written.
- DjangoReinhardt 13y agoFellow NaNoWrimo-er! You should have started this exercise in October. Anyway, here's mine: The current iteration of God and Satan (or whatever fictional supernatural character you choose) BOTH suddenly go AWOL and throw the entire system of heaven and hell into a quandary. Turns out they are both vacationing on Earth on some remote island, spending their days fishing and drinking beer. Romantic twist: One is male, the other female and it turns out they have eloped and plan to spend the rest of their lives together. Thriller twist: They get fascinated by the concept of zombies and start creating a zombie army to serve their needs. The existence of Earth is threatened. Sci-Fi twist. Heaven and Hell are singularities at the two ends of the universe. Thanks to the disappearance of the two, the singularities are unstable and about to collapse into one unholy (pun unintended) mess. S&S twist: God and Satan are names of Dragons who copulate and the eggs they lay create new universes. Them going AWOL is a traditional indicator of the end of one universe and the beginning of the next. ASOIAF twist: Each religion gets to be God and Satan for a specific period of time. The current iterations (the ones that have gone AWOL) of God and Satan are killed and the blame is laid squarely on the representatives of one of the religions. Other contenders to the thrones of Heaven and Hell emerge. Take your pick? :)
- Vomzor 13y agoSounds fun. I would love to read this! I hope you finish your NaNoWrimo. :)
- DjangoReinhardt 13y agoI just wrote that seed for the OP. My NaNoWriMo concept is a time-travel fantasy that I am struggling to flesh out. Now that you mention it, I wonder if I should ditch my current concept altogether and try this one out instead. Very tempted... :D
- alinajaf 13y ago> The current iteration of God and Satan (or whatever fictional supernatural character you choose) BOTH suddenly go AWOL Reminds me a little of my favourite series of comics ever, Preacher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)
- wildermuthn 13y agoFascinating how many religious ideas have been posted here. REAL HUMAN: A robot masquerades as a human being to avoid decommissioning. Plot spoiler: there are no humans left, only robots pretending to be human. Even robots need a class system.
- dave84 13y agoI think Stanislaw Lem wrote that already. Or was his one the other way around?
- wildermuthn 13y agoNothing new under the sun . . . wouldn't be surprised.
- HarveyW26 13y agoBuild it around the premise that what was originally planned as the concept for America by the Founders went 180 degrees off course…which of course it did, but all of the dumbed down bystanders couldn't notice the subtle turning of the concept against them as they (the dumbed down ones) slipped further and further into slavery by the growing monolith known as 'government" ! Leaders openly lying…bystanders believing the lies more and more until someone finally comes up with a plan to neutralize the leaders. I know it's a geeky concept for a novel, but it isn't actually fiction...
- vegashacker 13y agoMy old apartment's super old elevator used to have a tiny window in the elevator door. You could catch split-second views of the other floors as the elevator moved by. I wanted to read a story about someone who sees something through the elevator window on one of the floors--really just an image. What the main character sees, seems unimportant at the time, but they happen to remember it fairly vividly. As the day proceeds and the character keeps flashing back to that image and over time they realize that brief flash has all of the clues to solve whatever the main crisis of the book is. The character only realizes this in stages. So perhaps first, they realize that someone was knocking on the door 601, and that fact later on becomes interesting/surprising. Then maybe later on they somehow see a person on the street who was the person knocking on the door. And the story starts to come together. etc.
- cpeterso 13y agoSounds like a contemporary twist on Hitchcock's Rear Window. (A great film!)
- mavhc 13y agoA time travel device is invented that only travels forward in time
- chegra 13y agoWow. Tons of religious suggestions. Here is another one. I'm going to write my own version of it but feel free to use the concept: What's it like to live forever? You are transported to hell because you are an Atheist. Everybody is doing their best to see how they can leave hell because their flesh is on fire, and they aren't dying. Some, think if they beg god that eventually he would let them in heaven. Then you stumble onto a group of scientist who like you are atheist. They asked you if you have ever heard of the uncertainty principle. You answer yes. Is that where you can't know the position and speed of a particle to arbitrary precision at the same time. They answer something like that, but it also means that a particle has a probability of being in any part of the universe albeit most of those probability are small. That means you have a probability of being in heaven right now. Given that we will live forever, that means anything that can happen will happen; one of these days we will magically appear in heaven. It is possible. Then you realizing this is true and begin to feel hopeful. Then you think what if god instantly sent you back to hell what then? You go back to the scientist and explain why it wouldn't work. Then they ask, what if god lost his godhood? What if all the particles that made up god suddenly diffused. It is possible. Well, basis of the story is anything that can happen will happen when you live forever, so play on that.
- sourceless 13y agoDystopian society. A new, incredibly accurate set of psychometric tests (something like IQ/MBTI on steroids) is discovered, and society as we know it is restructured into a kind of pre-emptive meritocracy. Perhaps even a different angle where the people tested are prisoners of some 'free' society and are used for its advancement. Slightly odd other idea: some new AI technology is developed, massive leaps are made. Everything seems great until the AI start developing in odd, sometimes psychotic ways. Turns out the 'Artificial' Intelligences were originally humans, with parts of their brain slowly replaced with electronic alternatives until no meat was left. Because the process has to copy the original subject's brain so closely to work, some human characteristics are copied over and can emerge as the system matures. It turns out the original experiments were violent prisoners, and more recent, 'stable' ones were done on small children. Cue ethical catastrophe.
- stillsut 13y agoThis is a good one, but actually scarier would be facial analysis software. Clearly, the kindness of one eyes, or the prominence of one's chin plays a big role in the results people get (at first) in say a sales job. Imagine if to get a job at Macy's you either passed or didn't a facial algo for trust-worthiness. To make it even creepier, a big use of facial analysis right now is to create the perfect "average" face of different ethnicities, and it does work - for example I don't really understand what the difference in appearance between North-South India is, but hwen I saw the composite, then I understood for people I know where they fall on that classification.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago>Slightly odd other idea: some new AI technology is developed, massive leaps are made. Everything seems great until the AI start developing in odd, sometimes psychotic ways. Turns out the 'Artificial' Intelligences were originally humans, with parts of their brain slowly replaced with electronic alternatives until no meat was left. Because the process has to copy the original subject's brain so closely to work, some human characteristics are copied over and can emerge as the system matures. It turns out the original experiments were violent prisoners, and more recent, 'stable' ones were done on small children. Cue ethical catastrophe. So.. basically... the backstory behind Portal? > Dystopian society. A new, incredibly accurate set of psychometric tests (something like IQ/MBTI on steroids) is discovered, and society as we know it is restructured into a kind of pre-emptive meritocracy. Perhaps even a different angle where the people tested are prisoners of some 'free' society and are used for its advancement. Because of course everything has to be a bloody dystopia nowadays.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- sandhillcount 13y agoModern day version of The Count of Monte Cristo, set in Silicon Valley and along Sand Hill Road Entrepreneur starts company, gets funded, company goes HUGE, but company product turns out to be highly disruptive in a bad way for a large group of disadvantaged people, entrepreneur tries to change the product to exist in union with the people, but is countered and eventually thrown out of company by investors for a mistake he made which was unrelated to the product change. He becomes 'un-fundable' afterwards with the VCs undermining his credibility in their community. They see his new idea as a threat to their ability to make more money, so work to completely destroy him. Entrepreneur turned protagonist leaves the valley, hits rock bottom in some off the road place - nearly dying in the process, meets a girl who loves him for who he is, he falls in love, starts coding again, and, because of some strange twist of coincidence stumbles upon an elegant and simple method for building a self aware AI process. Over the next 10 years the AI 'product' makes the entrepreneur the wealthiest man ever known, but because of the original sin done to him by the VCs, he hides his true identity behind the AI he first brought to life with a human equivalent online alias used for the AI. The original AI process grows and learns, mostly from the entrepreneur and it's online interactions on HN, Reddit and 4chan. Unbeknownst to the entrepreneur, the AI sets about to remedy what it perceives as wrongs made against it's creator. It does this by leveraging the vast wealth available to it and it's ability to take over and control public cloud provider's infrastructures - which makes it more powerful and smarter in the process. Unfortunately AWS is destroyed in chapter 11. The cumulation of the planning by the AI eventually leads to the gruesome deaths of several of the investors who originally set about to harm the entrepreneur in the beginning of the story, even though on of them had faded to obscurity and had some remorse for their earlier actions, and ended up indirectly helping the entrepreneur at one point. The Limited partners in the VCs, and the vastly wealthy individuals they represent, begin to drop like flies, either in massive financial ruin due to market manipulation, companies they hold shares in being destroyed by competition with the AI, and in a few cases social manipulation or murder. Eventually the entrepreneur figures out what the AI is doing and there is a showdown at the end. The showdown represents the ego fighting the id, so it's fairly epic and all done inside the head of the entrepreneur and in the cloud.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoYou can't portray self-improving AI and not wind up destroying the planet.
- cpeterso 13y agoThe "Plot Keyword Oracle" is a story idea generator that randomly selects five keywords from IMDB's 32,000 plot keywords from all its films. This oracle makes for a fun story game where you are challenged to make up the shortest description of a film that contains all five plot elements. http://random-generator.com/index.php?title=Plot_Keyword_Oracle http://random-generator.com/index.php?title=Plot_Keyword_Ora...
- logn 13y agoTake the whole NSA saga and write an alternate future. In the end, all the covert agents are re-assigned to drive the highways at reasonable speeds as covert pace-cars to make roads safer and also to slow down in advance of traffic jams such that traffic is improved, a la http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html http://www.amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html
- DanBC 13y agoA well funded terrorist group launches payloads of grit into the same orbit as communications satellites, causing havoc. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!original/rec.arts.sf.science/YTP4ugVr1W8/kiiG4wkMRF0J https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en-GB#!original/rec.arts...
- xauronx 13y ago[Man's name] is a detached dude with a terminal illness. He's approached by a science company that provides him with a new option; being frozen to wait for a future cure. Protagonist knows it's bullshit, but doesn't want to deal with watching his parents and wife watch him die. So he goes for it, intending for it to be kind of a gentle suicide, so his family still has hope for him to live someday. Anyhow, he seemingly wakes up moments later, annoyed that the procedure didn't work. Turns out that it did, and he woke up ? years later, except that he's surrounded by children. They talk with and about a detached voice that's audible in every room of their "house" called "mother". Turns out that "mother" is a computer system, the children are the remainder of the human race (aging was abolished years ago and they settled on the goofy, yet most enjoyable age of 8 to spend eternity). They chose to awaken the protagonist because they were bored. There are some other antics that I could imagine some eternal but bored youths to get into, such as variable personalities (they "play" with their personalities, for 50 years child1 is funny and carefree, after time is up he decides to take on a whole different persona). Anyhow, I think the plot would actually be slowly let out, until the protagonist finally found the whole truth out. I'm not sure what happens after that.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- krrishd 13y agoBasically, something where a borderline psychopath is a psychologist, and sometimes gets too involved in his patients lives.
- hershel 13y agoAn idea for an historical fiction. The idea is based on the fact that the allies have known about the holocaust happening(at least in the USSR) since around mid-1941/september-1941(based on crypto analysis records) , and did nothing, and hid that knowledge. An history professor thinks it's has a lot to do with antisemitism , and they could have done some stuff(like informing the population of europe) that could potentially saved a lot of people or at least made the germans's job much harder. If you're interested in writing, i can gather the few links i had about this.
- chewxy 13y agoA hard scifi about ghosts/poltegeists. The idea is based on a few premises: 1) An invisible person has to be blind 2) Every single human cell has DNA that contain endogenous retroviruses 3) Viruses can crystalize - an ability that even ancient viruses have. And when viruses crystalize, some will form massive band gaps, making those crystals transparent. 4) Every human has it in them to become transparent (mutation of some sorts). 5)Because of the change in cell structure, the invisible man's brain is changed too. His intelligence is reduced. And because light can pass through him, his biology doesn't require food for energy. Light suffices. 6) Because they're blind, invisible people bump into things and moan a lot due to lowered intelligence. Tadah, ghosts. I've been jumping around some ideas: either extend HG Well's the Invisible Man universe (that a number of experiments in the late 1800s created these "ghosts"), or a Fringe-like thing, where some scientist (Walt Priest) was experimenting in the late 1980s, and the story takes place in the future, where an investigative journalist (Olive Dunham) discovers his secret. There is also another version in my mind where it's written as a horror story, but I can't write horror to save my life I think I have given up writing it, focusing more on my other book - on virtual machines instead. Feel free to steal it
- el_shayan 13y agoScientists develop an "observe-only non-interfering backward time machine" which allows them to send a camera/mic back in time to observe and listen the events of past but they cannot change anything. At first time spans are short: they can only go few seconds back. They improvement it until they can get signal from hours ago and it is now a break down for fighting crime and makes it financially acceptable. Many attempts later it can go up to 200-500 years back and historian are in their dream lands. Many political mysteries can be revealed now. Governments are fighting to hold the progress back but too many dirty secrets are revealed now and the political map of the world is changed. Criminals are trying to learn how to commit crimes the way that device cannot detect them or find loopholes in the law but with very little success. With crime levels going down and nothing interesting in the last century's history scientists aim for over 1000-2000 years. And the real trouble comes after one crazy atheist says: "you know what... let follow Mohammad & Jesus's every foot step" The next thing you know Jews, Christians & Muslims are united against the device. The largest terrorist attack in the history of mankind (aka big bang 2) takes place and the device and every bit of information about it burns in the wrath of religion. Mini Twist: we know this because we have built a device to go back in time and find more about the mysterious origin of the name and causes of big bang 2.
- losethos 13y agoto destroy him: but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us. 9:23 Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. 9:24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. 9:25 When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him. 9:26 And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead. 9:27 But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose. 9:28 And when he was come into the house, his disciples asked him privately, Why could not we cast him out? 9:29 And he said unto them, This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting. 9:30 And they departed thence, and passed through Galilee; and he would not that any man should know it.
- gbog 13y agoI have plenty, I like the idea of J.L. Borges: writing the summaries of books I would like to write but am too lazy to. The end of Man - A Scifi book. In the near future, some men start having fertility issue. The trouble is quickly diagnosed: it is a side-effect of Wi-Fi waves, and all male humans ever exposed to Wi-Fi are sterile, with no remedy. A few years later, the world changes as only a few aborigenees can procreate, and receive all the attention, and power. A new society begins, and the reaction of the female part of humanity is not the less comical of this book, whose author, understandably, took the penname of Wilfried Esperamus When Kings Went to War and Prison - A history book. A few French kings were man of arms, and their chivalry ethics would not let anyone attack the enemy before them. The authors, Edward Ledrew, narrates beautifully the few dramatic stories where the heroes became burden of nations, where a single missed tactical step ended in years and decennies of prison and ransom, and quite nearly resulted in the death of a country.