The Big Idea

Coronavirus is of course on everyone's minds right now and fills the news. What if you wanted to write a cautionary, near-future story that featured a society profoundly affected by COVID-19? Now might be a good time for that, in terms of using current events to generate story sales. But what if you weren't sure what kind of approach to take? This post offers three ideas on story settings in which the Coronavirus pandemic winds up changing the future. (NOTE these settings are much more dystopian than optimistic--if you'd rather not think about negative possible effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, you may not want to continue reading. Though I'm not being deliberately morbid...) I'm offering story setting ideas for free to anyone who wishes to use them (and am available to discuss story world ideas for anyone who wants to do so). But I'm not promising these are necessarily the greatest possible ideas--certainly there must be better ones. Nor do these ideas com...

All the way back in 2014 I had an idea I posted to this blog about a story universe based on magic that parallels the scientific understanding of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force). The universe would also have planets orbiting relatively close to one another in a complex fashion, within a single atmosphere, making it possible to literally fly from one world to another. I intended to launch this storyworld as a massive, multi-author project. Or write about it myself. But I never did so. So just as this blog has done for some time, I'm offering up the storyworld idea as inspiration to readers to create likewise. The main new thing I have to offer by giving a link to that former post (other than reminding everyone about the idea) is to mention I did a voice version on this topic, talking on my podcast about the story world idea, where it came from, and what could be done with it. In different words than I used on the...

Last week's post made an error. Unknown to me at the time, I included the Myst video game series as part of that list. And I've been repeatedly assured that the series was not only produced by Christians, its sales have been used to support missionary work (so is kinda "über-Christian" :) ). So I've moved it over to this list, which has the top ten speculative fiction stories by authors who are Christians. (Note I should have placed H. P. Lovecraft's short story, The Call of Cthulu, in last week's post instead.) I won't explain again the reason behind the focus of last's weeks post on originality, but I'd like to clarify that while I used the term "original story world," what would have been more accurate would have been "original setting." Because the setting of a story is a broader category than the story world. It would have been a better term to account for the fact that Jurassic Park in particular invented several ori...

Readers of this article who know me on Facebook probably will have noticed I asked on several sites that cater to Christian writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, what they thought were some of the most original story worlds of all time. I apologize that it’s not possible for me to include everyone’s choice. That’s true even though I decided I couldn’t narrow this list down to just one set of ten. This week I’ll look at the ten best “secular” (or not specifically Christian) stories and next week I’ll do the top ten original story worlds from Christian authors. Why “most original” story worlds? Speculative fiction is different from setting a story in a realistic scenario. Plot and characters are important for any kind of story, but in speculative fiction, the author gets to create the world from scratch if he or she chooses to do so. Yeah, some writers for a variety of reasons pick settings that are realistic or close to it (like Urban Fantasy). But one of the greatest pow...

I've done a series of posts on Speculative Faith that concluded by looking at Satanic influence in entertainment (I'm linking the last post in that series here ). Of course there's an inherent problem in even suggesting that it's extremely common for Satan to attempt to influence the content of stories. First, it sounds like I'm minimizing human responsibility for sin, which I don't mean to do (just because the serpent tempted doesn't mean Adam and Eve weren't responsible for doing wrong). Second, by pointing out where what we could call "negative influences" are laced into many stories, it may sound as if I'm rejecting creativity or denying stories can have good purposes--which I don't mean either, not at all, or I wouldn't be a writer and publisher. And third, so many people have freaked out about Satan in an over-the-top way that even mentioning the Devil causes some people's eyes to start rolling around, assuming nothing bu...