{"id":145,"date":"2018-07-30T20:04:47","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T20:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=145"},"modified":"2018-07-30T20:04:47","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T20:04:47","slug":"my-writing-new-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/?p=145","title":{"rendered":"My Writing – new ideas?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first started writing my science fiction I reluctantly stopped reading sci-fi. I was concerned about plagiarizing. Of course, I had read so many books in the genre over the years that I already had absorbed thousands of ideas that could not be erased from my mind. My book, The Fifth Prophet<\/em>, was an inspired idea, and the beginning of a wonderful journey through the land of literature. Subsequent novels were more deliberately constructed. Gradually, I returned to reading sci-fi as I realized similarity of ideas did not mean they were stolen. Of course, I never tried to rewrite Dune<\/em> with different characters, or change the setting of Middle Earth. My stories are as unique and weird as I am.
\nNow, I am constantly noticing similarities in the details between what I write and what I read. I just finished Roadside Picnic<\/em> by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The review is elsewhere. One of the objects recovered from the Zone is a \u201cspacell\u201d, a mysterious power source that is used like a thumbdrive and powers automobiles when inserted into the dashboard. They have \u201capplied them, discovered conditions when they multiply, can\u2019t create them.\u201d This is also a good description of my \u201chyperthreads\u201d from The Fifth Prophet<\/em>, that have fallen to Earth in several places like manna from heaven. The Strugatskys make little use of spacells in their story, whereas hyperthreads are fundamental to the success of my Family of Man.
\nThe similarities and coincidences are not just between my writing and my reading, however. In Perturbations Of The Reality Field<\/em> I stepped across the line of hard sci-fi, or so I thought. My hero, a young cab driver, and his angelic telepathic border collie, end up fighting to save the Earth\u2019s moon from destruction by the ratpeople. He \u2018drives\u2019 his Ford Escape SUV into orbit near the moon, enclosed in a space suit. Trust me, it is embedded into the story in a reasonable fashion. Still, the scene worried me until … a few months after publication I watched Elon Musk\u2019s Tesla and the spaceman!!! Maybe I\u2019m more \u2018prophetic\u2019 than I realized?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first started writing my science fiction I reluctantly stopped reading sci-fi. I was concerned about plagiarizing. Of course, I had read so many books in the genre over the years that I already had absorbed thousands of ideas that could not be erased from my mind. My book, The Fifth Prophet, was an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thefifthprophet.com\/wpBlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}