What's the story you would write if you were an author?

A lot of people worldbuild when they daydream and have the bones of a story kicking around in their brain, but have to pay the bills and raise the kids etc so they never flesh it out and write it down. What's your story's premise? Fantasy, sci-fi, alternate history, mystery, western, whatever genre.

Cracks_InTheWalls , (edited )
@Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works avatar

I'd love to write a really good acid western. So far all I have are daydreams about being a badass old west drifter to the music of Spindrift.

Edit: I suppose there's also what I started when I tried (and failed) NaNoWriMo, which was a horror story about a pathogen that made people deranged killers of a spectacular nature. There was a fight in a stained glass factory, that was kinda cool. Should see if the laptop with the draft still boots...

(If I recall the movie correctly, it was basically The Crazies, but more violent and written before the 2010 version came out [never saw the 1973 version])

joe_archer ,

I'd write a sci-fi story, which explains the fermi paradox. There are thousands of alien races all over the galaxy, but they basically all took one look at humankind and said "fucking hell no, those guys are absolute dicks".

Cryophilia OP ,

I've got a similar story that I've been workshopping for years...the alien races decide humans are too warlike, and after our first space war (against other humans, with us not knowing aliens exist yet) the alien council ruling the galaxy decides we're too dangerous and getting too technologically advanced, so they send an AI to try to wipe us out. Galactic civilization has been largely peaceful for tens of thousands of years so they don't know how to do war, but they program an ai to try to eliminate humanity while preserving the rest of life on Earth.

They mostly succeed, but in the conflict the earth does get devastated despite the best efforts of the AI. A human colony ship escapes, and hundreds of years later the descendants of the massacre return to wreak bloody vengeance on the rest of the galaxy.

Wes4Humanity ,

Over the next 100 years or so VR and haptic tech make it so people can become fully emersed in virtual reality. So pretty much everyone does. There are arguments on both sides, but eventually most people choose to live in their own world as a "god" with only VR interaction between one another. Everyone in VR stops having real kids, but thanks to AI improvements they can still have "kids". Technology eventually allows people to plug in permanently while their bodies are maintained by AI and robots systems. Eventually their bodies die, but their consciousness has been captured enough by the system that no one knows or notices when their VR friends bodies die in reality.

In the real world a very small segment of society refuses to join the VR universe and pledge to remain in the real world. Maybe there's some war in there because of this. Eventually though, the population of earth drops to maybe a few hundred thousand mostly wandering communal groups, while everyone else's consciousness is in VR systems. This is good for the planet.

After a few thousand years, the people in reality have multiplied and built a better more equitable world, but have completely forgotten about the people in VR, and the automated buildings containing the computers have become buried and lost to time. Until one day someone stumbles across one of these ruins and begins interacting with the VR people again despite a mythical belief system that such technology is all bad.

Some shit happens and there's a VR vs reality reckoning... Maybe some sort of Romeo and Juliet love story to keep it interesting.

HobbitFoot ,

Mankind has started colonizing the solar system, including installing a satellite at the Sun-Mars L1 Lagrange Point to protect Mars from solar radiation and dumping a ton of water and methane ice on Mars until it is able sustain a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on the surface. Then, Kessler syndrome hits Earth Orbit, which causes a chain of events that collapses society on Earth.

Thousands of years later, it is found that there are now landing paths to get back to Earth, even though these paths are sporadic. A Lunar nation invites a Martian nation to team up to explore Earth and what is left of humanity.

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