books someone should write: 1

in which I give you an outline and you write a story

yoshitaka amano’s work rarely makes me think of spaceships but this series always does

This will probably become a semi-regular thing I post and is related to a publishing idea I have for the future. I’ll compile these somewhere so that eventually someone can browse through a bunch of outlines for novel(la)s that I will probably never write but would love to see someone write.

Anyrate, this one came to me while Chelsea and I were watching Star Trek Discovery, which…maybe I’ll write about Star Trek someday. Probably I won’t since I’ve never been much of a Star Trek person.

Anyrate, if anyone takes me up on this, I’d love to see what you come up with.

Genre:

Science Fiction - First Contact

Characters:

Diplomatic mission to alien planet with a fairly large group of people but only a few primary characters. The cast is somewhat broken down by their function.

• Actual crew of ship – captain, engineers, mechanics, medical, etc

• Scientists – Team of scientists of various branches

• Government – Ambassadors, politicians, etc

• Military – Purely security function

The cast could be simply the top officials (Captain, Chief Science Officer, Ambassador, General) or you could do a cross section of people (mechanic, secretary, sergeant, anthropologist).

Should give you a lot of different kinds of tension to work with.

Setting:

Far future. Humanity has stretched beyond earth, but not by much. Space station colonies but no colonies on other planets. At the time of the story, humanity is more or less a united force. This changes during the time it takes for the spaceship to get to the alien planet.

Humanity has been looking for advanced life for hundreds of years. They’ve scattered probes out into space and discovered an advanced civilization on a planet very far away. Technologically, they seem to be advanced to the same level as humanity in the 20th century. They’ve studied their radio broadcasts and so on to analyze and make sense of the various languages. Humanity works together to send a large, formal expedition out to make contact with the aliens.

The spaceship is more like a Star Trek ship. Can hold hundreds of people. Self sufficient in terms of water, energy, food. The journey is done faster than light and takes the crew 18 months or something like that to get from earth to the alien planet. However, about 100 years pass for people on earth, in the colonies, and on the alien planet.

Underpinning Ideas:

The Fermi Paradox

Post-scarcity Humanity

Star Trek

Outline:

1. Story opens in the spaceship as they journey to the alien planet.

   • They’re about a month from landing on the planet.

     1. Unexpectedly, they cannot communicate with earth while traveling faster than light, nor can they make contact with the alien planet.

     2. Various interpersonal and professional tensions have led to the science crew becoming very siloed from everyone else while the soldiers and ship’s crew have formed a natural friendship.

     3. Show this with relative economy: maybe a few conversations between main characters.

   • Come out of faster than light travel to orbit the planet.

     1. Crew tries to make contact with aliens on the surface but can’t get a response.

     2. Finally able to make contact with earth only to discover that humanity’s cohesive unity has broken down. Countries are at war and the colonies face absolute desperation without support from earth.

     3. This leaves the group of ambassadors and functionaries in a confused state. The lead ambassador is from a country that no longer exists.

     4. Despite their inability to make contact with the surface and the bad news from home, they decide to check out the surface.

2. A group descends to the surface.

   • The surface crew consists of the lead ambassador, official translator, a few soldiers for security, and a biologist.

   • They find an empty city in ruins.

     1. Buildings are crumbling, overgrown by vegetation, and wildlife wanders through the city.

     2. They communicate with the ship.

   • The ship sends multiple crews to the surface all over the planet over the next few weeks.

     1. Everywhere, they find a civilization in ruins.

     2. Wildlife and vegetation overrun the ruined cities.

     3. No sign of the people who built this civilization.

3. The crew is in disarray between the absence of anything to discover and the collapse of humanity’s unity back home.

4. The crew tries to discover what happened to the people of this planet.

And the rest is in your hands, future writer of the kind of story I am ill-suited to write.

Like I said, I’ll probably keep generating and sharing story ideas and outlines at a somewhat regular pace. Hopefully some of you take advantage of this.