Sci-Fi Describe Something SciFi

Tom

An Old Friend
An exercise in creative writing. In a paragraph or three, describe something that fits into the Science Fiction genre. Something you made up yourself.
This is an open-ended exercise to help get those creative juices flowing.

Some Subject ideas:
A futuristic weapon or weapon system
A planetary defense system
A spaceship or starship (Interior or Exterior)
Futuristic clothes
Scifi handhelds
Futuristic computing systems
Futuristic furniture or appliances
Areas of deep space - voids, nebulae or clusters
1st appearance of new planets or moons
Effects of stars with different attributes than the Sun
1st Sight of alien life
Describe an intelligent alien
A unique civilization
A unique society concept
The Effects of emerging from cryo-sleep
The Effects of Faster than Light travel
The Effects of high gravity on evolution
The Effects of low gravity on evolution
A habit of an alien culture (smoking, drinking, doing drugs, etc...)
Futuristic human habits
Futuristic human diseases/afflictions
A new use for an old item

You should always feel free to chose your own subject matter. Just remember this is an exercise in creative writing. The main goal is to describe something so others 'see' what you intend them to 'see'. Another goal is to use known descriptive words and phrases that are common. Try to limit 'made-up words' as descriptors.
Try to address the senses; feel, taste, hearing, sight & smell.

Judging and Feedback:
We can judge each others work on a 1-5 rating system. 1 being "lots more work needed" and 5 being "you should publish". We should rate on an 'overall' effect of the description. Spelling and grammar should rank low in the rating process. The most important will be whether the work describes something to you. Subject matter should have no bearing on the final rating.

Judging Power - Those that submit works will have more power than those who do not.

Feedback Replies - Feedback is encouraged as long as it is constructive. Even submitted works that are a total mess should get feedback commending their participation.
Feedback Suggestions
Spelling & Grammar suggestions
Punctuation and Paragraph Construction suggestions
Descriptive Process suggestions
Simplicity suggestions
Focusing suggestions
Metaphor suggestions
Content and Length suggestions
Flow suggestions
Websites to find more information on Creative Writing Techniques

Do not submit artworks to clarify your subject. This is an exercise in writing creatively and describing something with the power of words. You are encouraged to start your own thread using your entry as an element to an enhanced story but your entry still must be submitted here to qualify for feedback.

Do not submit works that are already published. Even if it is your own work. All entries must be composed originally in this thread. Its about tuning your creative process not about what you write. For those that are already published, we welcome your feedback and entries. Feel free to experiment with writing styles and new description processes.

Finally... Everything you write is yours. You may do as you please with any content you write yourself. If you choose to publish someone else's feedback or comments on your work you must first ask the author's permission. Editing suggestions are just that...suggestions.
If you chose to use someone's edit suggestions to enhance your own content it is implied that the suggesting party forfeits ownership of said suggestion within the finished content. Example: Someone suggests that the appliance I am describing would make more sense being black instead of gray and I change it to black there is no ownership to the suggesting person. Its black because I decided to make it black.

This exercise is for fun and is by no means an official entity.
 
I see people's clothing changing, putting more and more emphasis on comfort. I am seeing more people wearing sweats and tees and pull-on and/or sneaker shoes. I think this will continue.
Part of this comes from the increasing amount of overweight people.
presumably we will one day see it as acceptable to wear such clothes at work and public places / shopping / spectator sports. Church? Work? depending on job, sure.

This trend might combine with the electronics habit. Will we see built-in phones or communicators? plug-ins for batteries/charging? maybe gadgets won't be built in so much as clothing will have special pockets or holders for devices.
 
I always thought anti-gravity devices would not work the way people think they will. Instead of just floating or hovering where it was activated I think it would be repelled (by Earth or Earth by it) at terminal velocity away from the surface. I called this idea "Slip-Grav".

Instead of turning one kind of matter into another kind of matter, I think it would make sense to store it in some form until we know what kind of matter we will need, so I deduced something I call "proto-matter". Sort of the way people thought stem cells would work, I guess.

That's two I am sharing.
 
Instead of just floating or hovering where it was activated I think it would be repelled (by Earth or Earth by it) at terminal velocity
Mass Inhibitors could reduce the reactive displacement of an object. Slip-Grav would be a very good method of launching payloads to orbit. There would still need to be a mass inhibitor sequence because even in space there is micro-gravity that the anti-grav would react to. To launch people/living things with the slip-grav there would need to be a velocity chamber or something to nullify the extreme g-forces.

I think it would make sense to store it in some form until we know what kind of matter we will need
Nano Technology promises this and is a very real science. With nanobots or utility fog matter remains atomically unbound until elements are joined by direction of the nanites. Any substance that has atoms could be rearranged to any element thus allowing matter to be constructed as needed. Even air has atoms. Proto-matter could be the term to describe the mass of atoms available for remapping.
 
I did throw up my first story on Amazon the other day, it is short at 85 pages, but I set it in a universe without all the warp and hyperspace stuff. They use "Deep Drive" which does not cancel out time dilation, so interstellar travel only really makes sense (most of the time) for one-way colonization. This means that colonies start at the low-tech spectrum because their populations are small.

I guess I could also write a short book about what happened to the newcomers to force them out of their world, I already mentioned it but it could be fleshed out. I have already given them kind of a complex back-story and a tiny bit of their history. Including a battle in their ancient history that was so bloody and brutal it turned a high-grounds into a plains. This sobered both sides and there wasn't another war there for many generations, until they got deposed.

I also backhandedly mentioned a group of people in a ship, or possibly more than one, of crazy geneticists who go from star to star playing God, bio-forming worlds and designing new creatures to populate them with. I called them Jaggers. They could have their own short book too.

So I guess that little story universe is still full of stories to tell.
 
Short Story Ideas?

Aliens addicted to a device like people are addicted to phones...

A radical group that un-invents technology and the repercussions of such an event

Discovery of very high technology microbial life forms

Discovery of evidence of ancient advanced technology on Pluto or in the Oort Cloud

A response to the Voyager message as soon as it passes beyond the Heliopause. Realization that the Sun's shock boundary insulates us from heavy alien communication systems.

AI Singularity occurs by accident in a slacker's computer in his/her Mom's basement. Said AI saturates the entire planet.

The discovery and isolation of a solar wavelength that renders all power sources obsolete and its collector is a simple solar panel the size of your thumb.

The discovery of a vibration frequency that causes steerable dimensional vortexes that can be traveled.

The discovery of a gravity particle that can be manipulated.

Discovery of an enzyme in the deep ocean that instantly repairs body cells and cascades the effect.
 
I decided I am going to finish a story I started a long time ago. I am going to motivate myself.

I am going to finish. or else, the cat gets it! No, not really
 
Sometimes in evolution, mutation is forced...

A young American student had come across an interesting concept. He discovered that to hypnotise someone you need their attention, then you make suggestions to their subconscious mind and over time those suggestions implant themselves. He recognised the 'attention state' required as extremely close to the submersive attention state that gamers often craved and sought out in their games. Using this state he would tap into the subconscious and use suggestion written into a gameplay to access the primal core of human consciousness and create a state of sexual arousal in people as they played his game, for a joke. He didn't hide it, made no secret of what he was trying to do, astonishingly it worked.

People began to download his programme at a phenomenal rate, demands came in for new and different states of mind. After a while he dispensed with the gameplay wrapping and just made what he called, 'psych-hits'. He began to charge for these small programmes and very quickly amassed a fortune.

Organised religions condemned psych-hits, governments and organised crime were onto it very quickly driving the original maker into hiding. As with any success there are those who resent it, hacked 'psych-hits' were released into the world, the 'psych-virus was born'. At first the effects were not serious, just people falling asleep but then came news of people committing violent acts, normal everyday people would randomly attack others, drive their cars deliberately into pedestrians and worse. Gradually the horror unfolded, it became apparent the scale of the horror was proportionate to how much the original 'psych-hits' had spread, which was far more than people realised.

Psych-hits were made illegal in many countries and other countries would soon follow. It became the new drug. Psych-hits were traded illegally on UBS sticks, buyers never knew what quality of psych-hit they would purchase, but the danger was part of the thrill.

Meanwhile, the original creator of psych-hits had been working on a collective consciousness, a state where he could bring the collective power of people together on a subconscious level, and use that human processing power to answer some of the worlds problems. He had spent much of his fortune researching and fending off government and organised criminal forces who wanted him dead. His final test programme was released and was successful, he began to prepare the full release. Unbeknown to him the government had used the test release to track him down.

In the final showdown he is killed, but not before the new collective consciousness virus was released into the world...

END

ZOC
 
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