Group novel structure

[marguerite]

Since Thoth and I are in danger of spinning our wheels at this point, I thought I'd start a new thread by summarizing where we've got with the structure so far (all points malleable after negotiation with other group members, and some molded by my POV). For the earlier discussion, see the "Group Novel" topic.

 

1) Genre: SF time-travel comedy;

2) Story goal: TBD by group;

3) Protagonist: one time agent--male? female? neuter? (hey, it's SF: could be an android or an alien, so long as he/she/it has some human psychology)--who can be sent by an Overseer to different times and places, where he/she/it morphs into characters determined by each individual author, in settings also determined by that author;

4) Antagonist: also TBD--I'd vote for one antagonist, another time agent who takes different forms, not necessarily known to the protagonist and set by the individual authors, but Thoth suggested the antagonist might be the protagonist in another form working against him/her/itself for reasons TBD--multiple antagonists all working to frustrate the protagonist are possible too;

5) Love interest: I vote for leaving this open, as that gives us maximum flexibility--love interest could appear or not, as antagonist or not, depending on the whim of individual authors (since it's time travel, even if we kill off the love interest to motivate the protagonist, he/she/it could still go back in time and resuscitate the love interest or fall in love with a string of others in the Jim Kirk style);

6) Time constraints (to add tension): so far we've come up with agent can remain only 24 hours in one body before being absorbed into that personality and agent can take only X forms before dissolving into a gibbering mess--we may also want to add agent must solve problem within X amount of time or something bad will happen (what depends on story goal);

7) Inter-chapter links: Thoth suggested a clue, supplied by the author of the next chapter, pointing to the next location and time and interpreted by the Overseer in a linking section between chapters. The protagonist and (maybe) antagonist, as well as the overall story goal, also supply links.

 

So far, I've picked 1550s Russia and Thoth has a grip on 1947 Roswell, NM. Everywhere/when else is up for grabs.

 

Did I miss anything? Thoughts? Emendations? Pleas to give up the whole idea?

 

Happy New Year to all!

Marguerite

[Steve E]

How is this thread different form the Group Novel thread Steve just arranged for us?

In any case (and I almost hate to do this) I have some (***shudder***) comments on your summary.

 

For the earlier discussion, see the "JaNoWriMo?" topic.

See the Group Novel thread. (Did it go up after you posted this?)

1) Genre: SF romantic comedy;

Genre: SF time-travel comedy. While we did talk about a love interest (briefly), no one said anything about turning this into a romance or romantic comedy. But why not? Sixteenth century Russia can be pretty darn romantic. And if someone places their chapter in the Old West, we'll have a SF time-travel romantic comedy western. And didn't we already agree to make our time-agent a kind of spy? (SF time-travel romantic comedy western spy novel?) That's the advantage of SF, it can be everything and anything. It is also why the genre is so often overlooked by "serious" critics. (Did you know that the original Dracula novel had a cowboy? It's true.)

3) Protagonist: one time agent--male? female? neuter? (hey, it's SF: could be an android or an alien, so long as he/she/it has some human psychology)--who can be sent by an Overseer to different times and places, where he/she/it morphs into characters determined by each individual author, in settings also determined by that author;

"Morphs into" or "inhabits the body of" (ghost like)? There's a difference. An important one.

5) Love interest: I vote for leaving this open, as that gives us maximum flexibility--love interest could appear or not, as antagonist or not, depending on the whim of individual authors (since it's time travel, even if we kill off the love interest to motivate the protagonist, he/she/it could still go back in time and resuscitate the love interest or fall in love with a string of others in the Jim Kirk style);

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether the antagonist or love interest is going to span chapters. If so, then we should probably pin down some basic parameters beforehand. (Perhaps we can get Joan Collins for the movie. She's a frisky 74 at the moment.)

6) Time constraints (to add tension): so far we've come up with agent can remain only 24 hours in one body before being absorbed into that personality and agent can take only X forms before dissolving into a gibbering mess--we may also want to add agent must solve problem within X amount of time or something bad will happen (what depends on story goal);

I have a small logic problem with the last part. Why can't the time-agent always return to a point just before the deadline? We'd need some plausible reason. Suggestions (other than "because I said so").

7) Inter-chapter links: Thoth suggested a clue, supplied by the author of the next chapter, pointing to the next location and time and interpreted by the Overseer in a linking section between chapters. The protagonist and (maybe) antagonist, as well as the overall story goal, also supply links.

Note that it is the writer of the next chapter who will speak for the overseer with respect to interpreting the clue. Consequently, everyone really writes two chapters. A short bridging chapter where the Overseer interprets the clue, justifying the jump to the next time and place, and a longer "action" chapter where the main story occurs.

 

Okay. Those are my 2¢. For now, anyway.

 

Happy New Year Everybody.

-Thoth.

[marguerite]

How is this thread different form the Group Novel thread Steve just arranged for us?

In any case (and I almost hate to do this) I have some (***shudder***) comments on your summary.

 

 

See the Group Novel thread. (Did it go up after you posted this?)

 

Genre: SF time-travel comedy. While we did talk about a love interest (briefly), no one said anything about turning this into a romance or romantic comedy. But why not? Sixteenth century Russia can be pretty darn romantic. And if someone places their chapter in the Old West, we'll have a SF time-travel romantic comedy western. And didn't we already agree to make our time-agent a kind of spy? (SF time-travel romantic comedy western spy novel?) That's the advantage of SF, it can be everything and anything. It is also why the genre is so often overlooked by "serious" critics. (Did you know that the original Dracula novel had a cowboy? It's true.)

 

"Morphs into" or "inhabits the body of" (ghost like)? There's a difference. An important one.

 

The question we have to ask ourselves is whether the antagonist or love interest is going to span chapters. If so, then we should probably pin down some basic parameters beforehand. (Perhaps we can get Joan Collins for the movie. She's a frisky 74 at the moment.)

 

I have a small logic problem with the last part. Why can't the time-agent always return to a point just before the deadline? We'd need some plausible reason. Suggestions (other than "because I said so").

 

Note that it is the writer of the next chapter who will speak for the overseer with respect to interpreting the clue. Consequently, everyone really writes two chapters. A short bridging chapter where the Overseer interprets the clue, justifying the jump to the next time and place, and a longer "action" chapter where the main story occurs.

 

Okay. Those are my 2¢. For now, anyway.

 

Happy New Year Everybody.

-Thoth.

Yes, Steve moved the posts out of "JaNoWriMo" after I started the new thread. There is no difference except that here you don't have to plow through 50 posts to get to the new messages (yet). And SF romantic comedy was a slip of the brain; I corrected my original post today. SF time-travel comedy was indeed what we agreed on.

 

At different times, we described the time agent as becoming the various characters (morphing) and as inhabiting the body of one character after another but retaining some sense of self. If the agent morphs, the individual authors have more flexibility, but how would the agent know to pursue the goal? If the agent inhabits, which you and I generally agreed he/she/it should do, pursuing the goal is clear and there's inherent conflict between the agent and the persona, but the group needs to set the agent's general personality in advance. The second possibility also makes me a little nervous because my romantic swashbuckler already explores a similar theme, but that's just me. I think the group should decide, if the group ever checks in and constitutes itself. But inhabiting does open up the set of plausible personae, since non-adults and even non-humans would have the agent to drive their actions.

 

I would prefer one antagonist, parameters TBD in advance. Whether we have one love interest, none, or many doesn't particularly concern me--many offers the most flexibility, though. The one point I'd really like to avoid is the protagonist having a single love interest but not knowing which persona that person takes in different time periods, as that's really close to my own novel plot.

 

Good point about the deadline. Perhaps the mission constraint shouldn't be time but something else?

Marguerite

[codemer]

I'm still catching up on posts, but I'll throw something out there for now just to help the creative juices get flowing, though you guys seem to be doing pretty well without me.

 

1) Genre: SF time-travel comedy;

2) Story goal: TBD by group;

3) Protagonist: one time agent--male? female? neuter? (hey, it's SF: could be an android or an alien, so long as he/she/it has some human psychology)--who can be sent by an Overseer to different times and places, where he/she/it morphs into characters determined by each individual author, in settings also determined by that author;

 

I vote for a super intelligent chimp named Arnold, reporting to his master, Dr. Good, who genetically engineered him with a larger than normal brain and special morphing powers. He can morph into anything he's seen; humans, dogs, fish, aliens, etc. There should be constraints on how often he can morph. It would be hilarious if he can understand and think in English, but can't speak in anything but, "Oo oo," even when morphed into a human.

 

4) Antagonist: also TBD--I'd vote for one antagonist, another time agent who takes different forms, not necessarily known to the protagonist and set by the individual authors, but Thoth suggested the antagonist might be the protagonist in another form working against him/her/itself for reasons TBD--multiple antagonists all working to frustrate the protagonist are possible too;

 

Extinct bananas. Arnold has goals to achieve, but his super intelligence has also given him a desire to pursue the flavors of all the extinct bananas of the world, and now he has a chance.

 

5) Love interest: I vote for leaving this open, as that gives us maximum flexibility--love interest could appear or not, as antagonist or not, depending on the whim of individual authors (since it's time travel, even if we kill off the love interest to motivate the protagonist, he/she/it could still go back in time and resuscitate the love interest or fall in love with a string of others in the Jim Kirk style);

6) Time constraints (to add tension): so far we've come up with agent can remain only 24 hours in one body before being absorbed into that personality and agent can take only X forms before dissolving into a gibbering mess--we may also want to add agent must solve problem within X amount of time or something bad will happen (what depends on story goal);

7) Inter-chapter links: Thoth suggested a clue, supplied by the author of the next chapter, pointing to the next location and time and interpreted by the Overseer in a linking section between chapters. The protagonist and (maybe) antagonist, as well as the overall story goal, also supply links.

 

I'll try to catch up on all the other posts this week.

 

IF

[Steve E]

I vote for a super intelligent chimp named Arnold, reporting to his master, Dr. Good, who genetically engineered him with a larger than normal brain and special morphing powers. He can morph into anything he's seen; humans, dogs, fish, aliens, etc. There should be constraints on how often he can morph. It would be hilarious if he can understand and think in English, but can't speak in anything but, "Oo oo," even when morphed into a human....Arnold has goals to achieve, but his super intelligence has also given him a desire to pursue the flavors of all the extinct bananas of the world, and now he has a chance.

Hysterical! You gotta love this guy.

 

But taking away Arnold's powers of speech (and I don't see why he can't morph vocal cords) is going to hamstring those of us who are more dialog than narrative oriented.

 

Okay. So that's one for a ghost-like protagonist (whose physical body isn't sent through time but, instead, enters people) and one for a morphing protagonist who can fit in as needed (perhaps he understands foreign languages and customs through telepathy). Marguerite, are you going to switch back to morphing?

 

Slow but steady progress.

-Thoth.

[marguerite]

Hysterical! You gotta love this guy.

 

But taking away Arnold's powers of speech (and I don't see why he can't morph vocal cords) is going to hamstring those of us who are more dialog than narrative oriented.

 

Okay. So that's one for a ghost-like protagonist (whose physical body isn't sent through time but, instead, enters people) and one for a morphing protagonist who can fit in as needed (perhaps he understands foreign languages and customs through telepathy). Marguerite, are you going to switch back to morphing?

 

Slow but steady progress.

-Thoth.

Well, if Arnold can recall his desire for extinct bananas even when he's a fish, I think he must be a ghost and not a true morph, don't you?

 

In any case, I hold out for a "ghost" and for speech, although if Arnold wants to go "ooh ooh" every time the Overseer sends him into a new body, it might make an, ahem, pleasing link between mini-chapters. Chimp speak would get a little dull after a while, don't you think?

 

Wondering how I ever wandered into this all-guy extravaganza. Help me, Calli, before I drown in testosterone-powered humor!

M

[Steve E]

Wondering how I ever wandered into this all-guy extravaganza. Help me, Calli, before I drown in testosterone-powered humor!

Yes! Let's hear some estrogen-powered ideas from Calli. M can't carry the ball (a testosterone-powered sports metaphor) by her lonesome.

 

All for the equality (if not the fungibility) of the sexes,

-Thoth.

[pjl]

Here's what I have so far, going off what's been mentioned earlier:

 

The year is 3025. The need for all base human desires are satiated by a series of implanted nanites that regulate and contribute to a completely balanced human being -- unlike the ones we see now. Into this uptopia a man and a woman are born, let's call them Adam and Eve for arguments sake, outside of the norm. Hidden away from the rest of the world they sire a child, but this child is of neither sex - he is neuter, quite literally. They raise this child away from the norms of society until one fine day a Professor, let's call her Saria, and her synthetic life form stumble across this strange family while out surveying possible new chemicals.

 

In a cataclysmic weather event, the parents are killed, leaving the child without the instruction he so needed to become a human. Saria, knowing she can give the child back at least a physical resemblance of a normal human, decides to go about this. But she knows that she cannot give him the insight into what he is, or where he came from, that the original parents might. She decides upon an ambitious plan to supplant the child's brain into that of a gynoid that has been designed as a prototype for time travel (in this instance, carrying the spirit of the traveler along with it).

 

The gynoid (acting as host) travels through time and learns what is to be human and passes this onto the consciousness held within. But as the travel continues, the gynoid develops its own consciousness... and whilst in Russia (or wherever) both Gynoid and the consciousness of the young boy (adolescent?) fall madly in love with the same girl.

 

and......

 

Well that's about all I have for now, except...

 

Somewhere along the line his consciousness is transported (malevolently by the gynoid as they struggle for the girl's love) into the body of a super intelligent chimp that the government has been genetically engineering for a long haul experimental space flight to Mars.

 

 

*My head hurts now, I'm going to take a nap*

[Steve E]

Okay. So let me see if I'm following this. You're voting against the time-agent and turning this into a voyage of self-discovery. No "organization". No "overseer" moving the gynoid from time/place to time/place. Unless Professor Saria is doing this; moving our hero once she learns her lesson.

 

Note to the Sci-Fi impaired among us: Gynoid comes from the Greek word "gynē" meaning "woman". The term is used to describe a robot designed to look like a human female, as compared with an android, which is a robot designed to look like a human male. A nanite is a teeny tiny robot on the scale of a billionth of a meter.

 

I like the back story but I'm not sure I see the point of introducing nanites. (Not that they aren't terrific on their own. Gotta love them nanites.) I assume the gynoid is introduced to help our hero fit in different times and places but how will he/she/it know the language and customs of a time and place. Does the separate gynoid mind know this stuff? Who runs the body?

 

Perhaps we could lose our neutered friend altogether and just have the Professor, taking pity on the poor little robot, send her through time to "learn her lessons" about humanity. We can still work simultaneously so long as we don't overlap times, places and life lessons.

 

But what's motivating the robot (or the neuter, for that matter)? Is she just following orders? Why does she (or it) even want to become more human? And does the Professor have ulterior motives? Do we each create our own antagonists for each of our chapters?

 

Okay. Enough questions for now. Time for everyone to mull this over.

 

Good job pj. Have a nice nap.

-Thoth.

 

Hmm. A time traveling female robot. I think someone has seen The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Part 2 is on Monday at 9pm EST on FOX.

[marguerite]

Okay. So let me see if I'm following this. You're voting against the time-agent and turning this into a voyage of self-discovery. No "organization". No "overseer" moving the gynoid from time/place to time/place. Unless Professor Saria is doing this; moving our hero once she learns her lesson.

 

Note to the Sci-Fi impaired among us: Gynoid comes from the Greek word "gynē" meaning "woman". The term is used to describe a robot designed to look like a human female, as compared with an android, which is a robot designed to look like a human male. A nanite is a teeny tiny robot on the scale of a billionth of a meter.

 

I like the back story but I'm not sure I see the point of introducing nanites. (Not that they aren't terrific on their own. Gotta love them nanites.) I assume the gynoid is introduced to help our hero fit in different times and places but how will he/she/it know the language and customs of a time and place. Does the separate gynoid mind know this stuff? Who runs the body?

 

Perhaps we could lose our neutered friend altogether and just have the Professor, taking pity on the poor little robot, send her through time to "learn her lessons" about humanity. We can still work simultaneously so long as we don't overlap times, places and life lessons.

 

But what's motivating the robot (or the neuter, for that matter)? Is she just following orders? Why does she (or it) even want to become more human? And does the Professor have ulterior motives? Do we each create our own antagonists for each of our chapters?

 

Okay. Enough questions for now. Time for everyone to mull this over.

 

Good job pj. Have a nice nap.

-Thoth.

 

Hmm. A time traveling female robot. I think someone has seen The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Part 2 is on Monday at 9pm EST on FOX.

How about a time-traveling neuter robot who has to experience both sides of humanity in order to become fully human (for whatever reason it needs to do that? because the nanites have taken over everyone else and turned them into pod people, so that they no longer have the capacity for innovative thinking required to solve some looming catastrophe?). Perhaps the robot has enough consciousness that it understands its own survival is at risk if it does not succeed?

 

If the robot is exclusively female, we run into the problem that women's roles, historically, don't change as much over time as men's. Plus the switching back and forth gives extra challenges to our protagonist while maintaining flexibility for ourselves (and would confuse the heck out of the poor robot as its desires alternate between being culturally acceptable and not so, the past being--with a few notable exceptions--less tolerant of trans-gender issues than the present).

 

The professor could program the robot with just enough historical information to allow it to function in its assigned role for each period, and we could include the short bridging chapters that Thoth proposed previously. In this case the robot and professor would go over the lesson learned in that life, then go over the next assignment.

 

All rather reminiscent of New Age spiritualism/reincarnation theory, but I like it. Great idea. Thanks, PJ!

Marguerite

[codemer]

How about a time-traveling neuter robot who has to experience both sides of humanity in order to become fully human (for whatever reason it needs to do that? because the nanites have taken over everyone else and turned them into pod people, so that they no longer have the capacity for innovative thinking required to solve some looming catastrophe?). Perhaps the robot has enough consciousness that it understands its own survival is at risk if it does not succeed?

 

If the robot is exclusively female, we run into the problem that women's roles, historically, don't change as much over time as men's. Plus the switching back and forth gives extra challenges to our protagonist while maintaining flexibility for ourselves (and would confuse the heck out of the poor robot as its desires alternate between being culturally acceptable and not so, the past being--with a few notable exceptions--less tolerant of trans-gender issues than the present).

 

The professor could program the robot with just enough historical information to allow it to function in its assigned role for each period, and we could include the short bridging chapters that Thoth proposed previously. In this case the robot and professor would go over the lesson learned in that life, then go over the next assignment.

 

All rather reminiscent of New Age spiritualism/reincarnation theory, but I like it. Great idea. Thanks, PJ!

Marguerite

 

If we intend to base the start time of the novel in the year 3025, how about having the gynoid/android/tadpool/whatever bounce into times between 3025 and 2025. Then we can play with the progress and regress of societal tolerance to atypical behavior.

 

"How dare you call me 'sir'! I am no prostitute."

 

IF

[Steve E]

Okay. So, in an attempt to make people better with nanites our future selves have inadvertently robbed humans of their humanity. The robot is sent back in to learn to be human so (how about this) the Professor can reprogram the nanites to make us human again. Of course we'll need lots of examples of that inhumanity to make the matter pressing -- hence the looming crisis. (E.g., We're being visited by aliens for the first time and without our human sense of empathy, such as it is, we will probably just kill than all and start an interstellar war. Or maybe, without out humanity, we have no interest in the future so we stop breeding. Or...well, pick a crisis.)

 

I have no problem with a neuter robot (gynoids just wanna have fun) and I can see some interesting romantic problems arising. But ghost in the shell or no ghost in the shell?

 

Bouncing between 3025 and 2025 leaves us open to create our own social problems but robs us of any historical authenticity. The past (pre-2008) is still rich and fertile ground. So let's not limit ourselves.

 

Sir, unhand that gynoid. She's the mother of my ipod*.

 

Thoughts anybody?

-Thoth.

 

*BTW: Apple is (rumored to be) announcing new products at MacWorld on Tuesday.

[Steve E]

Okay. So, in an attempt to make people better with nanites our future selves have inadvertently robbed humans of their humanity. The robot is sent back in to learn to be human so (how about this) the Professor can reprogram the nanites to make us human again. Of course we'll need lots of examples of that inhumanity to make the matter pressing -- hence the looming crisis. (E.g., We're being visited by aliens for the first time and without our human sense of empathy, such as it is, we will probably just kill than all and start an interstellar war. Or maybe, without out humanity, we have no interest in the future so we stop breeding. Or...well, pick a crisis.)

 

I have no problem with a neuter robot and I can see some interesting romantic problems arising. But ghost in the shell or no ghost in the shell?

 

Bouncing between 3025 and 2025 leaves us open to create our own social problems but robs us of any historical authenticity. The past (pre-2008) is still rich and fertile ground. So let's not limit ourselves.

 

Sir, unhand that gynoid. She's the mother of my ipod*.

 

Thoughts anybody?

-Thoth.

 

*BTW: Apple is (rumored to be) announcing new products at MacWorld on Tuesday.

[codemer]

Okay. So, in an attempt to make people better with nanites our future selves have inadvertently robbed humans of their humanity. The robot is sent back in to learn to be human so (how about this) the Professor can reprogram the nanites to make us human again. Of course we'll need lots of examples of that inhumanity to make the matter pressing -- hence the looming crisis. (E.g., We're being visited by aliens for the first time and without our human sense of empathy, such as it is, we will probably just kill than all and start an interstellar war. Or maybe, without out humanity, we have no interest in the future so we stop breeding. Or...well, pick a crisis.)

 

Sounds good. Imagine a large part of the population, maybe 450 billion people, or 55%, suffered from problems like becoming super reclusive, emersing themselves in VR. Some may even forget to eat altogether.

 

Bouncing between 3025 and 2025 leaves us open to create our own social problems but robs us of any historical authenticity. The past (pre-2008) is still rich and fertile ground. So let's not limit ourselves.

 

Oh, fine. If a 1000 year window is too small for you, let's try a 250,000 year window.

 

*BTW: Apple is (rumored to be) announcing new products at MacWorld on Tuesday.

 

"There's something in the air." Could it be a Mac Book Air? I want to see how the ethernet cable plugs into an ultrathin notebook with out a dongle.

 

IF

[marguerite]

Sounds good. Imagine a large part of the population, maybe 450 billion people, or 55%, suffered from problems like becoming super reclusive, emersing themselves in VR. Some may even forget to eat altogether.

 

Oh, fine. If a 1000 year window is too small for you, let's try a 250,000 year window.

IF

Yes, I agree with Thoth. Let's keep the time period open for the historically minded among us. Those who want to focus on "pure" (or at least purer) SF can choose the 2025-3025 time period, and those who prefer can stick to earlier times.

 

Or, don't take his Elvis and my Ivan awaaaaaaay!

 

Ghost in the shell, please. The professor could program a basic personality that grows as the neutroid learns.

 

On the crisis, suppose the aliens are fighting the galactic plague of nanites and have come looking for humanity, hoping to arrive just in time to rescue it but instead are too late. They can stop the nanites, but no one remembers what it meant to be human. Our neutroid must acquire human characteristics, effectively becoming human in its robot body, so that it can retrain the rest of the species.

 

That opens up all kinds of neat ideas on what it actually does mean to be human. Each chapter could explore a different trait.

 

The protagonist has to be a neutroid, not a person, flipping through time because the stresses of time travel would destroy a human body.

 

And the neutroid must acquire its skills before the aliens lose patience and decide to torch the planet....

Marguerite

[codemer]

And the neutroid must acquire its skills before the aliens lose patience and decide to torch the planet....

 

Since the robot thingy can travel to any point in time, what is the use of time constraints? How would we explain that time continues to run linearly while the robot is in the past? I have a picture of an explanation in my head, but I'm having trouble putting it into words.

 

I could picture a collective of aliens all plugged into some sort of neural interface and actually experiencing the robot's interactions in "real" time. That would keep the future linear.

 

Elvis will still be alive in 2025, so I don't know what you're worried about.

 

IF

[marguerite]

Since the robot thingy can travel to any point in time, what is the use of time constraints? How would we explain that time continues to run linearly while the robot is in the past? I have a picture of an explanation in my head, but I'm having trouble putting it into words.

 

I could picture a collective of aliens all plugged into some sort of neural interface and actually experiencing the robot's interactions in "real" time. That would keep the future linear.

 

Elvis will still be alive in 2025, so I don't know what you're worried about.

 

IF

This came up before. It needn't be a time constraint in the sense of 4 hours or less. It could be a time constraint in the sense of the neutroid having X chances to get it right....

 

Or perhaps the aliens are about to torch the planet, period, and the robot keeps trying alternate ways to prevent them, jumping into the present and seeing it being blown up, then going back for another try.

 

Or, when the planet is torched, the time machine may stop working, leaving the robot running on reserve battery power or something (although that gets murky, if the robot could go back to the moment just before the machine blows up).

 

Maybe the nanites could do double-duty and infect the time machine, moving steadily back in time. Then the robot couldn't just snap back to the moment before things began to go wrong, because the whole system is disintegrating around it.

 

Anyway, the point is that we can find a solution, and we must have either a time lock or an option lock (sorry for the Dramatica speak) to add tension to the book. No? Otherwise we're talking about literary rambles on the human condition, which are fine in their place but rather slow in terms of plot.

 

Elvis will live forever, of course, but Thoth wants him in Roswell to meet the blue suede aliens and the yowling hound dog in 1947.

Marguerite

[Steve E]

Or, don't take his Elvis and my Ivan awaaaaaaay!

Bless you Lady M.

Isaac, while we all know Elvis is eternal , I imagined working on a pre-famous Elvis (age 12, captured by Grays, in Roswell, in 1947). But if our neutroid is the hero, and doesn't act as a disembodied mind entering Elvis (or Ivan), I'm going to have to re-think this.

Ghost in the shell, please. The professor could program a basic personality that grows as the neutroid learns.

This, once again, raises the question of whether we are working simultaneously or linearly. A growing, improving neutroid implies that new characteristics must be passed on to the next writer.

On the crisis...

Believe it or not, I don't see this as something we need to work out beforehand. But it would be nice to know why there is a time constraint. As Isaac mentioned (and I mentioned earlier), a time constraint in a time-travel story is problematic. Isaac's solution of, say, "teachers", learning about humanity in the future as the neutroid learns about it in the past could provide a solution. But then, why doesn't the neutroid just return before it was sent and "download" the data then?

That opens up all kinds of neat ideas on what it actually does mean to be human. Each chapter could explore a different trait.

An ancient and honorable topic. I hope we're up to it. ("The proper study of man is man." Who said that?)

The protagonist has to be a neutroid, not a person, flipping through time because the stresses of time travel would destroy a human body.

It sure does. I'm a wreck for days after. That's why I always go as a spirit. Here's a thought: The "spirit" time-traveler leaves his body behind and can only return to the point in time where it left. This makes conversations with the "Professor" impossible but it solves half our problem. The time-pressure problem could be both imminent destruction and a limitation on how long a spirit can stay in the host. (Just a thought.)

And the neutroid must acquire its skills before the aliens lose patience and decide to torch the planet....

Again, there's that time-pressure problem inherent in time-travel stories.

 

Still hanging in there.

-Thoth

[Steve E]

Larry Niven, a sci-fi author who likes to stick with hard science, solved his time travel problems (including the Grandfather Paradox) in "The Flight Of The Horse" by plucking a gem from the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Basically, since every action creates an entire universe for every possible outcome of that action (seriously, the MWI actually says this) movement in time also creates entire alternate universes and their associated timelines. On the up side, you can go back in time and kill your grandfather so that you are never born. But you are never born in that alternate timeline, not the one you came from. On the downside, you can never go home. Not your real home. This is because time-travel from the past is still time-travel and you land in another new alternate time-line. (LN didn't exactly emphasize this last part.)

 

I don't know if this helps us but it's something fun (yes, I said "fun") to think about.

 

Heading for Tralfamadore,

-Thoth.

[Steve E]

"There's something in the air." Could it be a Mac Book Air? I want to see how the ethernet cable plugs into an ultrathin notebook with out a dongle.

 

I've heard terrible stories about people sitting in super-thins and destroying them. I have to wonder how Apple will solve this problem. (Spikes?)

 

Steve Jobs Keynote address will be available on Apple.com this afternoon (PT),

 

Perhaps the Steves will get together and bundle Storyist with Mac OS 11.

 

Wishful thinking,

-Thoth

[marguerite]

Bless you Lady M.

Isaac, while we all know Elvis is eternal , I imagined working on a pre-famous Elvis (age 12, captured by Grays, in Roswell, in 1947). But if our neutroid is the hero, and doesn't act as a disembodied mind entering Elvis (or Ivan), I'm going to have to re-think this.

 

This, once again, raises the question of whether we are working simultaneously or linearly. A growing, improving neutroid implies that new characteristics must be passed on to the next writer.

 

Believe it or not, I don't see this as something we need to work out beforehand. But it would be nice to know why there is a time constraint. As Isaac mentioned (and I mentioned earlier), a time constraint in a time-travel story is problematic. Isaac's solution of, say, "teachers", learning about humanity in the future as the neutroid learns about it in the past could provide a solution. But then, why doesn't the neutroid just return before it was sent and "download" the data then?

 

An ancient and honorable topic. I hope we're up to it. ("The proper study of man is man." Who said that?)

 

It sure does. I'm a wreck for days after. That's why I always go as a spirit. Here's a thought: The "spirit" time-traveler leaves his body behind and can only return to the point in time where it left. This makes conversations with the "Professor" impossible but it solves half our problem. The time-pressure problem could be both imminent destruction and a limitation on how long a spirit can stay in the host. (Just a thought.)

 

Again, there's that time-pressure problem inherent in time-travel stories.

 

Still hanging in there.

-Thoth

Suppose the neutroid did not travel itself but "connected" mentally in some way with individuals in the past (anytime up to 3025), experiencing their lives in a search for (what? an answer to a problem posed by the aliens, no longer available in the present because of the nanites' destruction/absorption of all human thought? a particular characteristic or set of characteristics it will need to negotiate with the aliens and acquire the cure for the nanite plague? the flaw that made humans susceptible to the nanites in the first place? alternate histories that could lead to a different future in which the nanites and/or aliens don't appear?). Then the neutroid can experience life as a 12-year-old Elvis or a 16th-century Russian girl or whatever.

 

At one point, we wanted a humorous book. There's more humor implicit in these contrasts (book protagonist vs. chapter protagonists) than in the harder-hitting plot we're now evolving.

 

If the neutroid doesn't travel, then we can set up a simple time constraint in which the neutroid will be torched along with the planet if it can't find the answer in X number of days/hours. We also restore what I saw as the best part of the old scenario, where each of us gets to set up his/her own world and characters, with the neutroid providing the ghost ("personality" TBD) that relates to each new protagonist. In fact, we wouldn't even need a robot, in that case; it could be a person with unusual gifts or. as PJ originally suggested, uniquely saved from the nanites who links to the chapters in turn. A neuter person, if you like (it's 3025, after all), although I don't care whether the protagonist is male or female--I just think it would be helpful to know up front.

 

And since we won't be dealing so much with an evolving personality as with various solutions to a problem that only work in concert (or only one of which works), we could write the chapters somewhat independently and link them through the introduction and conclusion.

 

I still like the idea of short bridging chapters in which the robot/person comes to, realizes things still aren't fixed, and gets sent off on another "mission," either with or without a clue supplied by the next author in line. Any thoughts on that?

M

[Steve E]

Suppose the neutroid did not travel itself but "connected" mentally in some way with individuals in the past...

That's close to our original time-agent idea. I'm still most comfortable with the spirit-time-traveler idea.

At one point, we wanted a humorous book. There's more humor implicit in these contrasts (book protagonist vs. chapter protagonists) than in the harder-hitting plot we're now evolving.

Our hero is learning life-lessons. Might I point out that there is more humor in the human condition than tragedy, at least from an outside perspective. (Chaplin trips and falls. To him that's tragedy. To us it's comedy. And let's not even mention Tom & Jerry.)

I still like the idea of short bridging chapters in which the robot/person comes to, realizes things still aren't fixed, and gets sent off on another "mission," either with or without a clue supplied by the next author in line. Any thoughts on that?

From a structural point of view I like the idea of short bridging chapters too. Since we seem to have moved away from the whole detective/time-agent idea I don't see how clues are still necessary. But passing a clue along is a lot easier than passing along a life-lesson with its corresponding changes in character. This life-lesson thing is going to be much harder to coordinate.

 

Check out MacBook Air and Time Capsule on Apple.com. (Who's that singing in the commercial? Melanie?)

-Thoth.

[marguerite]

That's close to our original time-agent idea. I'm still most comfortable with the spirit-time-traveler idea.

True, except that the agent as I proposed it isn't actually traveling in time. It stays in the present and mentally experiences the historical characters. Therefore it can be threatened with torching without people complaining that it could just have zapped itself to yesterday and kept on punching.

Our hero is learning life-lessons. Might I point out that there is more humor in the human condition than tragedy, at least from an outside perspective. (Chaplin trips and falls. To him that's tragedy. To us it's comedy. And let's not even mention Tom & Jerry.)

Good point. No argument there! (As anyone who ever survived a college mixer can attest.)

From a structural point of view I like the idea of short bridging chapters too. Since we seem to have moved away from the whole detective/time-agent idea I don't see how clues are still necessary. But passing a clue along is a lot easier than passing along a life-lesson with its corresponding changes in character. This life-lesson thing is going to be much harder to coordinate.

-Thoth.

Well, in my most recent post the hero wouldn't necessarily be learning life lessons. It could be searching for evidence as to how the nanite situation came about or exploring alternate histories. If the group wants it to learn life lessons, the lesson could be quite specific: how to negotiate, how to achieve compassion, how to identify the violent impulses in the human past that caused someone to invent the nanites, how to balance technology against freedom, the needs of the Many vs. the One (sorry, Spock made me say that ), and so on.

 

We could pick one big life lesson for each of us to explore in his/her own way, or we could pick an alternate goal. But I agree that if we're going to track an evolving personality (a series of life lessons, or even one life lesson learned through progressive stages), we'd have to write the chapters in sequence rather than simultaneously. That is, one person would start and pass the file to the next, who'd add another chapter and pass it on, etc. That was how Isaac originally proposed the project, and if we don't care how long it takes to complete, it could work.

 

The clues might be useful for the alternate goal. I don't think they'd have much relevance to the life lesson scenario; there you'd want something more like interviews with the Professor, summarizing the previous mission and defining the next one.

M

[marguerite]

Here's a possible scenario incorporating the stuff I mentioned in the previous post (and stealing shamelessly from PJ--thanks, PJ!).

 

Just to keep things straight, let's assume the hero is male and the antagonist female, although it could just as easily be the other way round. (Although, as Thoth put it so succinctly, bad girls sell.)

 

A female scientist, disgusted by humanity's intolerance and insistence on viewing comedy as tragedy (ok, so she's depressed, but give her Prozac and there's no story ), invents the nanites to turn everyone into the 31st equivalent of a Stepford wife. She sees humanity as a virus and the nanites as the cure. Indeed, they spread from person to person whenever acts of intolerance, violence, or general ability to understand the absurdity of life occur.

 

About to inject her toddler son, she is deflected by him giving her one of those toothy grins that 2-year-olds are so good at manufacturing just before a parent is about to hand them off to the nearest sucker. She can't go through with it. Instead, she allows his nurse to sneak him off, figuring that if he grows up intolerant, etc., the nanites will get him and she won't be directly responsible. On his head be it, and all that.

 

Years pass. Our hero grows. Eventually, in adulthood, he learns his own history. He confronts Mom, now loaded with a needle full of nanites and ready to strike (by now, she doesn't know him from Adam, and anyway, he's no longer cute and cuddly). He begs for a reprieve. He promises to show her the error of her ways. He will connect to one time period in history after another, and in each one he will persuade the character to whom he's linked to change his/her behavior to turn a potentially intolerant or violent situation into something charming, loving, or humorous.

 

Catch 1: he can only link to members of his own lineage. If he messes up, poof, there he goes.

Catch 2: Mom's impatient, so he has only X chances to convince her. Every time he succeeds, he delays the injection. Every time he fails, she moves the needle closer. Eventually, she's going to lose it and he becomes a pod person, too.

Catch 3: because he's preaching tolerance, he not only does but has to link to people in difficult situations. He switches genders, falls for bad girls/guys, has to cope with difficult cases of all sorts (maybe even becomes the deeply misunderstood Superchimp Arnold or Carve's squirrel, fighting all the stereotypes attached to his kind).

 

At the end of every chapter, our hero returns to the lab, where Mom (1) reluctantly acknowledges his success; (2) crows at his failure and threatens to take him out, while he pleads for his life; or (3) withholds judgment, either because she realizes he's shown her up and doesn't want to admit it or because she realizes he messed up but his intentions were good. In the end, of course, he wins her over, and she begins the process of un-naniting the world.

Marguerite

[Steve E]

I have no problem with this back story except for Catch 1. It seems to be in conflict with Catch 3. Or is our hero descended from squirrels and super chimps? In any event, Catch 1 seems unnecessary. Obviously "Mom" is in for a lot of character development in order to keep her sinister and convincingly threatening. Who writes her up front? I suppose we can each take a piece of her in the bridging chapters but character inconsistencies are likely (but you never know).

 

Okay. To keep the ball rolling, I'm perfectly happy to go with this back story (except for Catch 1). Crazy lady in the 31st Century turns mean people in Stepfordoids using contagious nanites. She allows her son to try to talk her out of it by proving man's basic humanity using time travel (a bit extreme given that there must still be some non-Stepfords left in the world). All the while she is threatening to rob him (her son) of his free will (making her the most inhumane, so why didn't the nanites get her too? Or do they?) It can work. How do the rest of you feel?

 

Still recovering form 9AM eye-surgery today,

-Thoth.