Sci-Fi, fantasy and speculative Indie Authors Review discussion

So who else has had this problem: you're writing away (or planning to write), and you've got an idea or a tone or a hook, and you're pretty sure it's a good 'un...

...and then you read a book that did it first. And you go "OH BUMS" because now you feel like you've ripped them off even though you know you didn't.

(I had this happen recently when I read Dreams of Shreds and Tatters shortly before launching my first ebook. Depressing!)

This has happened to me twice. My very first this-could-actually work story I came up with when I was twelve had included the concept of talking dolphins working with humans on an alien planet. Then I found the book Star Tide Rising, which was pretty much the same thing (although not the same plot, so I still may go through with my talking dolphin idea).

The second one involved a human's DNA being infused with alien DNA, making him a shape-shifter. A couple of weeks later, I see previews for the movie Species. I was rather bummed out on that one.

Not a plot, but way back in the early days of writing my vampire scifi, I had a (human) character with the last name of Cullen. Had to change that one when I decided to publish.
Then again, for the same book I had to change my MC's love interest's name because I would eventually meet and marry a man with the name I originally picked. ;)

Christina wrote: "way back in the early days of writing my vampire scifi, I had a (human) character with the last name of Cullen. Had to change that one when I decided to publish."

Hopefully you didn't change it to Grey or you'd have been caught coming AND going!

LOL!!! No, I actually turned the character into a generic vampire and killed him off before we could learn his last name. ;)

Sneaky!

I've had reality do this to me.

In Swords for a Dead LadyI had the characters caught up in major riots in a city which caused a lot of damage. Between writing it and it being published the UK had riots in several major cities so my book starts looking derivative. :-(

Then in War 2.2part of the plot is a guerrilla group using 3D printing techniques to make most of their weaponry. Again between writing and it being published somebody produced the first printed handgun

Life can be far more interesting than art at times :-)

Personally, I wouldn't worry about this kind of thing. The same basic idea turns up all over the place. Look at how many space ships have sentient talking computers. It's a transparent plot device, but everybody does it.

Christina, have you thought about that scenario where you named a character in a story and later ended up dating them? Maybe invoking their name summoned them from the depths?

I started writing in the 1970s, and eventually created a character who had magical powers (enabled by technology--this was sci-fi, not fantasy), wore an identity-concealing helmet, and a black outfit complete with cape. Then I saw Star Wars--Darth Vader. No way to use the character after that, since everybody would think it was a Darth Vader ripoff. But, as the '80s wore on, and Star Wars fever died down, I did develop a story based on the character. After all, he wasn't that much like Vader. I sold it first as a short story, and then used it to form the basis of my first novel. So far, no one's pointed at him and said "Darth Vader," or at least not so I could hear it.

Richard wrote: "Christina, have you thought about that scenario where you named a character in a story and later ended up dating them? Maybe invoking their name summoned them from the depths?"

Hmm... Maybe I should open a dating service.

*shoves a notebook at prospective clients*

Here, write me a short story.

Charles wrote: "So who else has had this problem: you're writing away (or planning to write), and you've got an idea or a tone or a hook, and you're pretty sure it's a good 'un...

...and then you read a book that did it first. And you go "OH BUMS" because now you feel like you've ripped them off even though you know you didn't.

(I had this happen recently when I read Dreams of Shreds and Tatters shortly before launching my first ebook. Depressing!) "

It shouldn't be depressing because it happens far more often than most people realize.

I have a variety of stories in various stages (I really need to make time to finish editing "Mono-Earth: The War of the Egg) featuring diverse characters. The reality is other than the androids (not a new concept) or the intelligent egg-laying mammals (hopefully not too over-worn) I've written about, others have written about the same things though not in quite the same ways.

Trying to come up with a story that's 100% original in all aspects is virtually impossible -- what is possible is a somewhat new treatment on the human / sentient condition. While there will be similarities to other works, as Ken pointed out there will be differences that should make your work distinct.

Thinking you found a new way of doing something and then finding out it's been around for forty years and you forgot you saw it when you were a child can have a sobering effect.

One way to have a real difference is the way the process is applied. There seems to be a thousand ways to do something, and maybe a hundred ways it actually works, and perhaps only ten of them are actually the right way to do it.

Richard wrote: "Personally, I wouldn't worry about this kind of thing. The same basic idea turns up all over the place. Look at how many space ships have sentient talking computers. It's a transparent plot device,..."

Very true, but there's always this knee-jerk reaction when it comes to discovering that your idea already exists. You kind of go through a "stages of grief" thing - shock, disappointment, perhaps a little anger or just mild annoyance, paranoia that if you do go ahead with your story people will accuse you of ripping off the existing work, acceptance with a touch of melancholy, or acceptance with a touch of "to heck with it I'm writing it anyway," followed finally by the realization that just because an idea has been done doesn't mean it can't be done again.

Speaking for myself, it sometimes takes me a while to get to that final stage, depending on how similar my idea is to the existing work.

Yes, I fear this also.

In fact I become 'jumpy' about it. I start to project my idea into every book cover and every movie clip that I see.

I keep getting that, "Bummer!" moment(Glasgow term for your "OH BUMS!"). Then I have to scan the book description and... "No, it's different! Okay... Good. Wait! What's that book? It looks like... Bummer!"

Was brainstorming a series last year around a group that goes universe hopping. Never watched Sliders or gave it any thought beyond it being the show the kept getting cancelled and revived, but it struck me earl this year that it might be the premise of what I was envisioning, so finally sat down and watched it. Sure enough, it was similar enough to what I was envisioning that I would have to give it a serious reworking before ever deciding to write it.

On the other end, some years ago, I was doing a throw-away serial on a message board for a couple years. At that point, I was watching Days of Our Lives (What can I say, I liked Ali Sweeney) and I started noticing some of my plot points and story elements were showing up months after I used them. Had a main character in my work who was a former stripper, and they even had a stripper show up for one scene with the same stage name afterwards...a lot of coincidences and I'm sure that's all, but it is fun to claim Days of Lives had stolen my ideas.

Saw Terminator Genisys the other day and the scene where the bus goes off the edge of the Golden Gate bridge started looking suspiciously familiar, but it played out far too differently to think it resembled something I wrote.

I would like to think that describing how a group of characters (not a single character) react to events and interact with each other is still open to original ideas. Not sure about it though as there are plenty of stories written in languages I don't read and times I haven't been to.

After 100 billion people and 50,000 years, perhaps we have run through all the scenarios in real life.

I've not had it with a plot, but with a technology.

Since 2013 I've published several works about a Posthuman society where most everyone has a wireless brain-to-machine and brain-to-brain device installed. I call the device Nplant and the software controller (or operating system) Nterface.

While at Worldcon this year I saw several panels and a presentation with Ramez Naam, the author of the Nexus trilogy. It's all about the ethical and political implications of exactly the kind of technology I've been using. I'm almost finished reading the first novel, which was published a year before my first Posthuman Cycle novella.

His ideas are somewhat different than mine in minor details, and his plot focuses on that technology whereas my novels treat Nplan and Nterface as ubiquitous tech, so entrenched in Posthuman society as to be unremarkable, but is so many ways it's exactly the same.

My problem now is that I had planned to write a story about the Posthuman bloc that invented Nplant and Nterface, but I'll have to consciously steer it away from how Naam approached it. In a sense that will be easier now that I know his work, but in a sense it will also be harder because...I know his work and could be unconsciously influenced by it.

OK, so aside from actual cases, let's talk about synchronicity "theory" ... or more specifically, what I call Spore Theory (although it's actually just a hypothesis):

Premise:
--There is such a thing as a "thought spore."
--Some people are spore transmitters.
--Some people are spore receivers.
--Thought spores are created by spore transmitters and travel around the world at random.
--When thought spores are received by spore receivers, they seem to be the original idea of the receiver.

Are you a spore transmitter? Here's how to tell:

You're walking around--dum dee-dum dee-dum--when suddenly BING! Wow! That's a cool idea! And then you speculate about how it could be implemented and marketed and sold and distributed...only to conclude that it's way bigger than anything you could ever achieve. "There's another cool thing I'll never do." And you go about your life. (Later you may find out that someone actually did your idea. That's happened to me. A friend and I basically invented the idea of music distributed digitally and instantly around the world, downloadable and stored on tiny devices with a lot of memory, like what actually happened with MP3s--iTunes, you owe us--one night at a bar back in 1986.)

Are you a thought spore receiver? Here's how to tell:

You're walking around--dum dee-dum dee-dum--when suddenly BING! Wow! That's a cool idea! And then you rush ahead to implement that idea.

Of course, people can be both transmitters and receivers. And thought spores are not necessarily one-time things. Six or seven or a hundred spore receivers may pick up the same spore and implement it independently, all of them thinking that they came up with a doozy all on their own, only to find out later that they weren't necessarily the first.

There you go. Synchronicity explained (but not proven).

has thought spores, only his can cross parallel universes, so you often get ideas which could only work if the laws of physics were different.

Larry Niven has the brain upload/download idea (not the first I suspect) - there's a very spooky story where he repeatedly creates clones of a person, downloads a snapshot of her brain into the clone and tries to convince her of something (can't remember the thing). If she doesn't agree, he kills that clone and starts another. Not pretty.