by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Everyone is so busy destroying the world in fiction, I find myself thinking about the opposite — given the opportunity, how would you rebuild civilization on a new, habitable planet in a new solar system? The key condition of the scenario would be that other than the high tech zapping that would be involved, humanity would be forced to work together using the present-day level of technology to bootstrap a global civilization back into existence.
Now, the issue at the moment is I have pretty great scenario but no plot. I need an excuse to run around this idea. What I like about this scenario is sort of the “I’ll give you something to cry about” nature of it. What if, on a macro basis, the United States was forced to make some high stakes macro decisions that would affect the lives of everyone on earth? Do we even have it within us to pull that off?
The point of the story, whatever it ultimately became, would be that people do strange things when macro power politics are involved. I mean, just think about how casually the Korean peninsula was divided after World War 2. That would be something this story explored — what if some “other” forced humanity to think up some some way to create a common global civilization?
I have an idea of how it would be done, but it would be so controveral and cause so much anger on the part of all non-Americans (and a lot of Americans, too!) that that, unto itself, would be the source of a lot of the plot.
But, again, at the moment, I just don’t have any plot. Nothing. Just a very expansive universe.
