Consequently, here’s a writing tip for you. If you want to write formulaic, derivative, science fiction-flavored prose product (which I will admit, can be quite lucrative), you should read and watch nothing but other people’s science fiction. Do this for years, without fail, and you will never be at risk of accidentally having an original idea.
Case in point, ten years into the Stupefying Stories saga I remain appalled by the amount of thinly
disguised Star Trek fan fic that
continues to show up in our slush pile. These stories bother me not because
they exist, but because of the utter desolate poverty of authorial imagination
they reveal. For pity’s sake, folks, if you want to write an “our navy at war
in space” story, at least read the World War II Pacific theater combat history that Gene
Roddenberry lived, and based his hopes and visions of the future on.
Do this, and possibly, just maybe, you might come up with an idea for a story that has not already been used and reused until it’s threadbare by every generation of SF writers for the past 75 years.
Which segues into our second writing tip for today. If you do want to think seriously about the future, and increase your odds of having an original idea once in a while and perhaps even of writing a story that might be of some consequence someday, read history. Knowing humanity’s past is not a perfect guide to imagining humanity’s future, but it’s a good place to start.
Personally, I read a lot of history, and the more I read, the more I realize the truth of one of my favorite quotations:
“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
—Karl Marx
The trick when you see an historical pattern repeating itself is to figure out which it is this time: tragedy or farce?
In 1789 the French began their revolution against the ancien régime—which is to say, against pretty
much everything old: the monarchy, the Catholic Church, their own history; they
even revolted against the calendar, creating a new calendar composed of twelve
thirty-day months divided into three 10-day weeks (décades) each. This new calendar retained none of the traditional
month or day names; Year One began with the abolition of the monarchy and the
founding of the Republic, on the date formerly known as 22 September 1792. Therefore, by the French revolutionary calendar, Friday, June 26, 2020, was 9
Messidor CCXXVIII—or Nonidi of décade 28, or for rural peasants who apparently weren’t thought to be capable of mastering decimal numbers, Échalote (Shallot) Messidor, each day of the year being named for a
different agricultural product.
The next month in this calendar is Thermidor, which begins on July 19th and runs through August 17th.
The astute observer will note that in the revolutionary calendar a year is 360 days long, as opposed to be the more conventional 365(ish) days we know. The French were still trying to resolve this problem—along with the problems of how to get people in general to throw out their old clocks and accept dividing each day into ten 100-minute hours, and how to get workers in particular to accept only having the weekend off once every ten days—when the wheels came off the whole damned thing. Today, vestiges of the hottest month on the French revolutionary calendar survive in two things only: the name of the recipe for Lobster Thermidor, and the political concept of the Thermidorian Reaction.
A Thermidorian Reaction, in general, is the moment in nearly every revolution when some well-armed and disciplined faction, usually the nation’s army, says “Enough of this,” and steps in to restore order at bayonet point. Thermidorian Reactions are typically characterized by massacres of protesters, summary executions of revolutionary leaders, mass executions of their followers, show trials and long prison terms for those revolutionaries who survive, and the establishment of an iron-handed military dictatorship.
The original Thermadorian Reaction took place in July of
1794, when the French army finally decided it had had enough of Maximillien
Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety’s Reign of Terror and decided
to put a stop to it—permanently.