Ideaspace is a Harsh Mistress

In other news:

AAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHH!!!

Why the big argh, you ask?

Well, if you scroll up a bit, you'll notice that I talk about a project called Savage Things which, to recap, is about people trained from birth to be living weapons and then getting unleased on the world.

Guess what Ben McCool's PIGS is about. It's not quite the same idea but it's close enough that doing Savage Things is probably a no go. Which is a shame, because I really liked that one. Ah well.

I'll probably replace it with Savant, which is ALSO about someone trained their whole life to be a killer (hey, when you find an idea you like, you stick with it) but is pretty far removed from PIGS or Savage Things.

On the other hand, there are always new ideas to replace the old:

As I was (finally) drifting off to sleep last night, I had this idea. I suspect the news stuff about the last ride of the spqace shuttle might have had something to do with this.

Actually what I had was an image, which was of someone looking up into the night sky and seeing a moon that covered in....something. It looked like it was crawling.

The idea that popped into my head behind it was what if aliens came and decided to colonize the moon. They are powerful, they are here and they aren't talking. They're just there, where no one can ignore them.

What the story would be about, I think, is the idea of people trying to accept and understand this terrifying but not actively malevolent thing, with a sub focus on the idea of being confronted with something truly alien. It's the out of context problem.

The thing is, I don't know that I can write this story, at least not like that. The part that seems linked to the shuttle is the idea that the Moon is right there, but as of right now, we don't really have the means to get there. So there's this thing hanging in the sky like a loaded gun, and we can't do anything about it. So there's a story there about the people scrambling to get to the moon and make first contact.

Now the story I probably can write is about trying to get to the moon and make direct contact with the aliens, where the exposure to an alien presence starts to affect the people assigned to make contact. Something along the lines of The Thing meets Armageddon. But it seems like that's leaving story potential on the table.

Ah, I don't know.