Science Fiction by Charlie Jane Anders

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Not too many people like to write science fiction, but for those who do, there aren't too many tips out there for y'all to look at. I copy and pasted (I am so sorry) this from this link http://io9.gizmodo.com/5950104/10-ways-to-generate-killer-science-fiction-story-ideas (also it's in the external link, so that y'all could have an easier time understanding.)

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Science fiction is the literature of big ideas — so coming up with an amazing story idea often feels like the biggest stumbling block in the way of your dreams of authorship. So what do you do?

The trick is not just to come up with a great idea, but a great idea that lives in your mind and leads to characters and situations that inspire you. So here are 10 pretty decent ways to generate your own amazing story ideas.

And it really is true that ideas are dime a dozen in science fiction. Take the idea of "first contact with an alien race." There are a million possible variations of that idea alone: They come to us. We go to them. They're super-advanced. They're not using anything we'd recognize as technology. They communicate using only colors. They think emoticons are our language, and all the other stuff is just punctuation. They're giant. They're tiny. They're invading. They're well-intentioned, but troublesome. And so on.

The hard part is finding an idea that sticks in your head and starts to grow weird angles and curves. In a sense, it's not about finding a good idea — so much as finding a good idea for you, personally. So here are some tips, that may or may not be helpful:

1. Look at the big unanswered questions

Like, why haven't we heard from other intelligent civilizations yet? And what'll happen at the end of the universe? Why is gravity such a weak force? And so on. The bigger and more insoluble the question, the less likely it is your answer will be disproved next week. Once you come up with your own weird explanation for a big cosmic riddle, then you can work backwards from that to create a story around it — and the hard part is probably keeping your story big and audacious, but also finding a way to make it small and personal without resorting to "learning the truth about the cosmological constant also helped me realize something about my daddy issues." Everybody loves a big, audacious idea-driven story, as long as it's well done and emotional.

2. Imagine a new scientific or technological discovery — and then imagine it ruining your life

It's easy enough to imagine a brand new scientific breakthrough. It's even easy enough to think about some of the obvious consequences, if we suddenly develop radical life-extension or a "learn while you sleep" process that works. But try to imagine how a brand new science could wreck your life — how it could make your life, personally, a living hell. And then try to turn that into a story about a fictional character. (Bonus points if the way that the new invention ruins your life isn't a super obvious way, and is instead something kind of weird and personal.) It's always more interesting to see people struggling with new technology than to watch them just do the happy "yay new technology" dance.

3. Take your biggest fear about the future and take it to an extreme

This is sort of on a related tip, except that it's taking your personal fears and blowing them up. Do you worry you'll be alone and unloved when you're older? Or that your career will tank, and you'll be one of those people who used to have a decent job and now works at Round Table Pizza? (No offense to people who currently work at Round Table Pizza, but whenever I walk past one I notice the staff look utterly demoralized. Maybe it's the weird Arthurian/Italian mixed metaphor.) Take your fear about your personal future and make it huge and global, if not cosmic. Use that fear as a way into a story about something going terribly wrong with the world in general. (Or make it still a personal disaster, but more science fictional — think Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside, about a telepath slowly losing his abilities.) Your final story doesn't even need to be depressing, or about the exact fear you started with. But that visceral dread can lead you to something personal but universal, which is what it's all about.

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