You will be presenting the technology that will be included in your science fiction story.
Maybe you want to start by explaining a problem that your technology will fix.
Then go on to explain the solution and the technology.
What is it?
How does it work?
What are the current uses of your technology?
Maybe your setting is the main focus of your science fiction story.
Describe the setting in detail.
Why that setting?
For both of these, you might want to discuss your idea for your story.
What is your author’s purpose?
Do you want to offer us hope or make us rethink what we are doing now?
Here is the story I am writing:
Virtual Burial, Inc.
Problem: We are running out of room to bury physical bodies.
Technology: Digitizing a body (digitizing physical objects)
Solution: We could send the physical body by network to be buried on another planet or location on Earth, or we could store the digital body on a server somewhere, like a file, so we could visit it- like opening a Word document. There would be a virtual cemetery, like a Facebook.
Story idea: The idea is being implemented. Things are going along well for a while. Then bodies start showing up incomplete. Data is being lost somewhere. You might think no one would care because the people are dead anyway. However, the company made a promise to its customers to bury the bodies in soil. Later we find out that data is being intercepted and organs are being harvested and sold. Parts of the bodies are being undigitized and the organs reused!
Author’s purpose: I want us to think about the vulnerabilities of our current system of data transportation. It would also have us think about the value we place on the dead after life has left the body.
I got the idea for this from a variety of sources.
- The story combines ideas like digital transport from movies like Star Trek.
- Traveling through the Internet is from movies like Lawnmower Man and an episode of Fairly Odd Parents where Timmy goes into the Internet.
- The problem of burial space is from Japan where space is a premium.
- The idea of having to bury a body is from the Jewish religion that believes the body must be returned to the ground intact.
- The error idea comes from packet sniffing, which is capturing data packets on a network.
Trying to come up with an original idea is hard. That is why I am combining technologies into a story that is like a modern day grave robbing scheme.
