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What I Won't Do Next Summer, I Guess

Here are a selection of plot ideas guaranteed unsaleable in the science fiction market of yesterday, today, and any variant of tomorrow. Sorry to bring this up again, folks, but the end is nigh and one must have a unity of vision:

An intelligent culture on a far planet is not carbon-based but perhaps silicone- or silver-based. There is no "organic" deterioration after death and therefore these creatures make no distinction between the living and the dead. The dead remain in residence, are fornicated with, talked to, manipulated, used as the subjects of advertisements, given responsibilities (obviously met poorly; they are shiftless) for work, child care, and so on.

The dead are obviously less efficient at most of these tasks than the living but they are humored and tolerated as the senile or extremely aged are in our own culture, and because they do not register organic collapse, their presence is not actively unpleasant. In fact, it is kind of reassuring. As well as possible the inhabitants of this culture put a good self-denying face on the inadequacies of the dead just as Victorians would cover up for batty, incontinent relatives on their premises.

A group of missionaries from a carbon-based culture land on this planet, survey the situation, and are of course horrified. Gently but very firmly they teach the natives the difference between the "dead" and the "living" and the necessity to "bury" and "put away the memory of the dead.

Slowly their message works its way through the culture and slowly the natives reach an understanding of the difference between "life" and "death."

Needless to say they are filled with spiritual terror when they realize that the dead are quite different from them and that this difference has to do with the extinction of consciousness. The culture in the face of death's apprehension goes mad, becomes dysfunctional, the natives turn upon the missionaries and kill them and then begin to slaughter one another. The only way to control death, they surmise, is to administer it themselves. (If "death" is a conscious, perpetrated condition rather than an unhappy inevitability, it can be manipulated, threatened, offered, or denied.) The culture becomes a charnel house; it becomes centered around the rituals and ordeals of murder.

It does not last much longer.

 

* * *

 

A Messianic figure in an alternate or future civilization is homosexual and preaches that only through conversion to homosexuality can the present human condition change and the time of Revelation and Reconstruction begin.

The reason for this is practical: universal homosexuality will cancel procreation and bring the ongoing generations to a halt, ending humanity within about a century. This Messiah has prophetic conviction and textual justification; he overcomes all of the manifold social resistance and brings about that era which soon enough will bring to fruition all of the prophecies mysteriously locked within the Book of Daniel.

 

* * *

 

A science fiction editor who hates the field and is incapable of understanding it rejects every promising writer and idea which is presented, preferring to deal with a tight circle of friends, who in return for the editor's contracting for debased material, offer kickbacks. The relative success of the line and the kickbacks enable the editor to amass a sufficient amount of money to become a publisher, where he continues his policies successfully until his house sets the standard for all science fiction. He is finally undone by his success: expansion means that he must hire staff editors, the editors merrily interpose themselves between the publisher and the writers and they conduct their business exactly as the publisher does, which is to say that they buy from friends and take kickbacks. Unfortunately, several of the manuscripts that slip through are of sufficient originality and technical facility to sell badly. The publisher loses his commanding edge in the market; by the time he fires his staff and seizes control, it is too late, his imprint has lost its reliability and predictability for the audience, and before he can sell to a conglomerate he goes bankrupt. His third wife takes their remaining assets and leaves him. He contracts boils.

(It is the template which is the problem here. Make the product matter transmitters rather than novels and you might sell this. To a friend. For a consideration.)

 

—1980: New Jersey

 

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