I came across this story at The Daily Galaxy a couple of months ago and thought it was a tremendous source for a story idea.

According to the news piece, plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” to be built on the moon by the European Space Agency. The Ark will contain the essentials of life and human civilisation and will be activated in the event that Earth is devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war – or, for us writers, alien invasion or zombie apocalypse – destroying the human species. This lunar information bank would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A Doomsday Ark is being planned for the Moon.

Ark 1.0 would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and useful instructions such as how to smelt metal or information about agriculture. It would sealed in a vault and be buried just below the Moon’s surface with transmitters sending the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survive, the ark will continue transmitting the information until new receivers could be built. Ark 2.0 would later be extended to include a diversity of species from the biosphere, natural material such as microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores. Presumably version 2.0 will also have social networking.

Now apocalypse scenarios aside, this is a great opportunity for a more thoughtful piece on the entire concept of a Doomsday Ark. Imagine that we get advance warning that the Earth is about to be hit by an enormous asteroid, likely to devastate life on earth, but this time we can’t just get on the phone and ask Bruce Willis to save the day. However, we do have sufficient time to create and deploy a doomsday ark or series of arks and maybe give the survivors, if there are any, a chance of starting again, armed with important learning tools and information for re-booting the human race. What would it need to contain? What’s important, and what isn’t? My argument is that this is just ‘stuff’ that we do, but what is the essence of humanity, and frankly, is it worth saving? I can envisage something akin to 1998′s Deep Impact or, one of my favourites, 1997′s Contact, movies which are light on CGI extravaganza – although they both have their moments – but rather heavier on the philosophical and psychological impact of this kind of event.

It would also be important to think through what we would leave out. There’s a strong case – in my humble opinion – to not include information about religion or politics. Let the survivors find their feet on those subjects alone. A post-apocalyptic world will have it’s own crosses to bear and drums to bang. Then again, concepts like government and church have a habit of imposing order on chaos, helping folk to make sense of their lives in a larger context. This is deep, rich stuff for a film to tackle.

Now lets go the other way. What if the information we send up is wrong, or gets corrupted in some way, then we end up re-starting the human race in a totally different way to what was originally envisaged. So what could go wrong. Was it the genetic codes? Did the seeds and embryos we send up become horribly mutated by the storage process? Are we leaving a destroyed Earth just to end up destroying the Moon? Is it in our natures to just destroy everything wherever we decide to lay our hats? It’s an interesting concept to work through.

Anyway, that’s it for this post, I’m not going to labour the point there’s enough here to be getting on with but I hope someone out there thinks it’s worth considering. Good luck and good writing.

Cheers!

Basically, for a lot of companies in China, recruiting fake businessmen or having foreigners around in nice suits, gives the company 'face' and is a good way to create the image of 'connection' that these Chinese companies crave. For the foreign 'recruits', the only qualifications are a fair complexion and a dark suit, that and a burning desire to be put up in a swish hotel, be chauffeured around, wined and dined and come out the other side having earned a grand a week for doing sweet fanny adams.

The only qualifications are a fair complexion and a dark suit.

In fact these rent-a-white-guys are so important for some companies that it's not unusual to keep a couple of them around on contract for a number of months, rolling them out for a week or so every month for some press junket, grand opening or dinner-do where all they have to do is deliver a carefully prepared speech and then stand and smile while confetti is blasted over the stage and fireworks go off above them as they pose for photos with the local mayor. And so we have the basis of many fish-out-of-water stories…

We could go the route of the action/thriller, a down-at-heel guy is offered the chance of some easy money in short order and heads off to China only to be set-up as the fall guy for the murder of a big business owner or politician. He then has to retrace the events leading up to his being hired, following the barest minimum of clues, and track down the people who hired him, leading to a top-level conspiracy which he manages to foil while clearing his name – or not – as the case may be. You could take the option that he saves his skin but has to go into hiding because "..you can't fight City Hall", kind of a cross between 1993's Dave and Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

You could also approach it from the perspective of a case of mistaken identity. Our guy, despite being the rent-a-white-guy, is mistaken for the real deal and ends up being chased by bad guys from another corporation or a government agency or similar and he has to evade capture, imprisonment, torture or worse, while convincing these people that he isn't what they think he is, he's just a poor schmoe who got sucked into something he wasn't expecting. Of course as he evades his pursuers and proves to be a smart cookie, all he does is feed the flames of that mistaken identity because no-one that smart isn't involved….a nice catch 22 for our man. Once again, take a look at a Hitchcock film, in this case North By Northwest or, for a more comedic slant on the idea, try 1997's The Man Who Knew Too Little with Bill Murray or Tom Hanks in The Man With One Red Shoe.

If we are deciding to write comedy instead of thriller then this is fertile ground that provides rich pickings. The case of mistaken identity could see two guys going to China for new jobs, one is eminently qualified for a very senior position and the other is our rent-a-white-guy. Some mix-up sees them get into the wrong cars at the airport and they end up in each others jobs. At first, Guy A thinks things are great, lots of perks, chauffeur driven car, nice meals, good office and not much work to do so he thinks they're 'easing him into it'. Guy B on the other hand, finds himself thrown in at the deep end of an aggressive corporate take over, totally out of his depth and needing to find a solution to the problem to save the company and the jobs of the thousands of folk who work there. I like the idea of reaching the end of the movie with Guy A happy to have left the high-pressure environment behind and revelling in his new slacker lifestyle while Guy B has embraced a new found success as a corporate man and is heading up the company he helped to save. As I sit here writing this I'm thinking The Prince And The Pauper meets Volunteers.

As a final suggestion I think this would make a great TV series. Our guy heads off to China – the archetype fish-out-of-water – to be the rent-a-white-guy for a couple of weeks and it turns out that actually the young Chinese executive that's supposed to be running things doesn't have a clue. Our slacker, with a slightly dodgy background and some experience of hustling for a living ends up helping him to turn around a bad situation and thus ends up staying for longer because the company – in the shape of our executive – decides they need him around. Cue weekly episodes of bizarre, comedic East-meets-West clash of culture shenanigans and laughs all around.

So, a simple idea, one that's grounded in reality but with lots of story potential – good writing. Cheers!

Advanced Imaging Reveals Computer 1,500 Years Ahead Of Its Time

Early studies suggested it was some type of astronomical time-keeping device and establishing initial tooth counts suggested that it followed the Metonic cycle, a 235-month pattern commonly used to predict eclipses in the ancient world. But recently, advanced imaging techniques have allowed researchers to read more of the inscribed Greek text, and X-ray imaging has helped to create full 3-D computer models of the complex device revealing the full function and beauty of the Antikythera mechanism. Using an ingenious system of gears, operated by turning a crank on the side, the device can perform a number of functions. It can predict the month, day and hour of an eclipse, even accounting for leap years, it can predict the positions of the sun and moon against the zodiac and it has a gear train that rotates a black and white stone to show the moon’s phase on a given date. Very possibly it could also show the astronomical positions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the planets known to the ancients.

But the true genius of the mechanism goes beyond even the complex calculations and craftsmanship of a mechanical calendar. For example, the ancients didn’t know that the moon has an elliptical orbit, slowing down or speeding up as it moves through the zodiac, but the Antikythera Mechanism, probably built around 150 B.C., uses epicyclic or ‘planetary’ gears with a ‘pin-and-slot’ mechanism that mimics this apparent shifting in the moon’s movement, and while devices with this level of engineering complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, the Antikythera mechanism’s compactness actually betters later designs. Researchers theorise that the device is based on an Archimedian design, and might even have been built by a workshop carrying on his technological tradition, but if the design had been ‘industrialised’ in such a way, it remains a mystery why have we never found another one like it.

Everyone loves a good mystery and this story – which I first read at io9 – while firmly anchored in historical fact, opens up all kinds of possibilities if you start to play the ‘what if…?’ game, especially in the science fiction and fantasy genres. What if this mechanism wasn’t invented by the ancient Romans, but created by a higher intelligence? I can imagine an alien craft, crash landed on Earth 1,500 years ago and in need of a spare part to get off the ground. Without the kind of technologies it would be used to it uses what is to hand to manufacture something to take the place of the piece it was missing and what we have here is actually one of the prototypes that didn’t quite work as well as was intended. An alternative is that this is a device manufactured to help send an SOS to the mothership so that stranded alien can call the intergalactic AA in order to be rescued.

Both of these options open up a number of questions, what happened to cause the crash? How did it survive? Did it meet people? How did they react? How did the alien react? Did they communicate easily? How? By answering each of these questions, and similar ones, we can start to shape a story and some of the set pieces that would comprise the movie begin to take shape. In fact I can already see a movie that combines elements of E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, Frankenstein, Stargate and even Starman, where the stranded alien isn’t a little kid it’s an adult, a non-hostile one, who befriends some poor Romans who help it to understand it’s surroundings and build the piece it needs to help it get home. In return the alien builds them this ‘toy’ to help them predict seasons, maybe grow crops more easily, and they prosper until one night a storm sinks one of their boats and leaves this mechanism at the bottom of the sea until a sponge diver recovers it thousands of years later…the end.

Another, slightly more cerebral route to go down would be to use it as the great discovery, the relic found by someone in Roman times that sparks huge interest because it is so far advanced compared to their own technology. In a case like this I see a slow-burn story in the vain of Contact, one that takes time to build but grows complex characters who ask difficult questions about who we are, where we come from and if we are really alone.

In my version of this story, we follow the device as it is discovered in a desert somewhere by a nomadic tribe and brought to a gathering where it is traded for a couple of camels. It is then brought to a village and sold to the local elder who debates it’s worth with his spiritual leader who, recognising it’s ability to put him out of a job, declares it evil and thus it is sold on to a passing caravan who bring it by land to a larger town. There the priests of the temple experiment with it and begin to discover some of what it can do, whereupon an elder declares that it needs to be sent to a larger temple in the big city and off it goes. Unfortunately the party are set upon by bandits who discard it but it is found again by a column of Roman soldiers heading back to the capital. They bring it to Rome where it is discussed at length by scribes and scientists who discover it’s tremendous worth but are torn between exploiting it to grow the power of the empire, or hiding it because it proves the heresy of the planets orbiting the Sun rather than the other way around. Eventually it is decided it should be removed from the city and taken to Greece where a Roman Scholar based there can reverse engineer the technology for them but before it arrives, the ship carrying it sinks and it is lost forever.

A nice twist to this story would be to impart the device with some kind of otherworldly power that has been noticed throughout history – hence the inscriptions around it, but we have yet to discover as we haven’t fully uncovered the mechanism or the text.

There’s clearly a lot of mileage in this story, I haven’t even touched the story of construction of the device itself, but there might well be a story there of an ancient scholar, an engineer, physicist and astronomer that pre-dates Galileo by many years and who constructs this device – against all the politics and religious doctrine of his time – in order to benefit his people and advance science by many years. However, his work is banned and he fails in his attempts which is why we are where we are in technological terms. The twist here would be the aliens watching us develop and then sighing in resigned frustration when close-minded dogma forces us to shoot ourselves in the foot and we end up developing much more slowly than anticipated and that’s why we haven’t been allowed to join the Intergalactic Space Federation!

So that’s it for this post, a lot of food for thought I think and definitely some stories here worth pursuing. Happy writing.

Cheers!

BTW, if you’re interested Scientific American has a two-part video about the Antikythera Mechanism and the imaging techniques used in the research.

According to the report luxury ocean liners in Russia are offering pirate-hunting cruises aboard armed private yachts off the Somali coast. Wealthy clients each pay £3,500 per day to patrol the most dangerous stretch of coastline from Djibouti in Somalia to Mombasa in Kenya at deliberately slow speeds, hoping to tempt an attack by Somali pirates. Once attacked, and in case the raiders are bit slow to respond the cruise ship will keep going until they do, the craft is equipped to respond with heavy machinery – RPGs, large caliber machine guns and rocket launchers – and if that wasn’t enough fun for the passengers, an extra £5 a day gets you your own AK-47 and £7 buys 100 rounds of ammo, and in case things get a bit out of hand they are also protected by a squad of ex-special forces troops.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about story possibilities and there are a bunch of things to discuss here. Lets look at the obvious choices:

1. A group of rich guys decides to pay big bucks to go on the ultimate big game hunt and eventually the tables are turned and the hunters become the hunted.
2. A peaceful group of Somali fishermen suddenly find themselves the targets of a group of ruthless hunters, once cornered they have to overcome their peaceful natures and fight back using makeshift weapons in order to stop the carnage and save themselves and their families.

Both of these are okay story choices and with enough twists and turns could make decent enough action movies but they are the obvious choices to make with this material. Option one sounds a bit like 1932′s The Most Dangerous Game meets Deliverance and option two sounds like Apocalypto with a dash of Surviving the Game and to be fair there are a number of ‘human prey’ type titles out there, from the kitsch 60′s excess of La Decima Vittima to 1980′s Arnie, before he was the Governator, gurning his way through Running Man, it’s not a new idea but it’s also not an over-exploited one either and while it still has the power to shock it’s worth exploring.

I’d keep in mind group dynamics when writing this. Whether they’re good guys or bad guys you need a group of them and they will naturally be different personalities, some strong, some weak, some good, some bad and they will play off of one another to inform the story. If there’s a definite bad guy amongst them then he will drive the hunt onwards but to counter that you might have a guy with a stronger moral compass, maybe a weaker personality as well, and he can see the evil that is being done and is wavering about stopping it or going with the flow. That being the case, then he should be the one to stand up to the bad guy and try to stop the hunt. Whether he succeeds or not is down to you but in option one, if he does something to stop the killing, his salvation might be that he is the only one to survive once the tables are turned.

It’s worth keeping in mind the “quotes” that came out at the same time as the article, one, attributed to a Russian yachtsman Vladimir Mironov, was “They are worse than the pirates, at least the pirates have the decency to take hostages, these people are just paying to commit murder.” which, for me, speaks to theme in a big way but the other was from a US Navy Captain who allegedly said “You’re in international waters, there are all sorts of other competing interests….” which adds conflict and interest in the shape of outside influence – for good or bad, it’s your call.

Anyway, I won’t dwell too much on this at this time, although I might come back to this idea at a later date, and the reason is the next, related, item that is actually true and that I found on this website and again at Reuters while trawling for more detail on this post.

So the headline reads Investing in piracy at the Somali “stock” exchange and basically the story goes that in the main pirate lair of Haradheere, locals can buy-in or contribute in some way to any one of a number of “companies” that go out on these raiding missions and take a share of the spoils upon the raids successful completion. The exchange started with 15 companies and is now up to 72 and the potential return for an ‘investor’ can be illustrated by the story of Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee who contributed a rocket-propelled grenade that she got from her ex-husband in alimony to a maritime company and made $75,000 in only 38 days after joining the ‘company’.

But it gets better. By all accounts the influx of wealth has seen the local economy boom. Pirates are charged more for most goods than non-pirates and earnings from piracy get taxed by the local district and used to improve infrastructure such as roads, local hospital and schools, and here we have real storytelling gold.

In my first thoughts I envisaged a Robin Hood tale of the handsome Somali pirate, a loveable rogue whose exploits provide food and clothing and education for all – robbing the rich to give to the poor – and the seafaring equivalent of the Sheriff of Nottingham, hell bent on destroying the pirate and his merry band by any means necessary. But dig deeper. Why has piracy taken such a strong hold on the people and how come the ‘authorities’ turn a blind eye to how the money is made? Can we explore the politics that effects the region and the global policies of all the countries involved to see how they came to this. It’s not all black and white and it would be interesting to find out the shades of grey in there.

Dig deeper still and we can look at the legacy that this is creating for the children of the region. A world where stealing and killing – because that’s what piracy is – is the norm, acceptable practice and and everyday way to earn a living. Who will stand against it if there is no other way to make a living because the local economy is completely based on it? It would be interesting to put an outsider in the middle of all this and watch them deal with it, a bit like Anna & The King or Inn Of The Sixth Happiness. You can either try having them see the world through outsiders eyes and try to change things, eventually seeing that this is the only choice for the welfare of the people and learning to accept it, or they could eventually become truly involved, maybe starting as a love interest for a pirate and then seeing the darker side of what he does before fighting to change things for the better and having to choose between the man and the ideal.

Anyway, that’s enough of my rambling on the subject, please let me know what you think of my efforts and feel free to leave comments.

Cheers!

Drinking at a Five Points tavern in the 1870s. (NY Public Library)

It really starts to come to life when you read the names these women had, like Hell-Cat Maggie, whose base was the notorious Five Points slum and whose teeth were supposedly filed into sharp points while she clawed rivals with brass fingernails. Then there’s Sadie the Goat, who reportedly robbed East Siders by head-butting them in the stomach and Ida the Goose, a prostitute and Lady Gopher, part of the Gophers of Hell’s Kitchen.

Now I know nothing of Ida The Goose or the Gophers but apparently, in the 1910s, she was lured away to the Lower East Side’s Eastman Gang, led by Monk Eastman, but following a bloody shoot-out, rejoined the Gophers. Now that, to me, is your story, right there. Lets’ talk through some of the simple the questions:

• How did she come to join the Gophers
• What was her ‘rank’ in the gang?
• Why did she leave and join The Eastman’s?
• What caused the bloody shoot-out?
• How did she survive?
• Why did the Gopher’s take her back?

The first idea that comes to mind for me is a love story, somewhere between West Side Story and Romeo & Juliet where the star-crossed lovers are members of two rival gangs. Ida decides eventually to follow her heart and join the rival gang to be with her love until tragedy strikes and, bereft and consumed with grief, she is forced to return to the Gophers as they are the only ones that will still have her.

Now I recently watched a BBC drama called The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister which have been described as the Rosetta Stone of queer literature which, while really rather good and worth the watch, actually tells me we could easily put a twist on the usual love story and make it about two women. If you think about it, it’s not that hard to believe that in a time when society frowned upon homosexuality, these two women fell into a life that not only held a total disregard for authority, allowed them to live the lifestyle that they chose without having to explain themselves to anyone – provided they could hold their own in a brawl.

This means we could time-shift the story to show a ‘respectable’ woman’s fall from grace as she realises she cannot live an unhappy lie in luxury when she’d rather be true to herself and happy in relative poverty. We could then witness her descent into the gangs along with her lover and slow rise through the ranks using wit and guile and cunning rather than just brute force – but back it up with a fist or two when it counts.

So that’s me out, have a think about it and let me know if you decide to pursue any of these suggestions, I’m curious to know if anyone’s reading this and if they think it’s at all useful.

Cheers!

On May 21, 1984 two of the inmates of a prison in Celle, Northern Germany, having manufactured this little beauty and then demonstrated its effectiveness by letting fly at a pane of bullet-proof glass, took a prison guard hostage and escaped by car. Amazing! The ingenuity of human beings when confronted by a situation that has them (almost literally in this case) up against a wall never fails to astound me.

Now then, for any writers out there that are seeking inspiration this shouldn’t really need any explanation. However, if you are struggling though, think about these questions:

• How did they know how to make it?
• Where did they get the bedposts from?
• How did they saw them to length? And how were they not heard and discovered?
• Where did they get stuff like batteries and a light bulb from?
• How did they calculate stuff like velocity, range, expansion etc?
• Where the hell did they get shotgun cartridges from?
• How did they not just blow their bloody hands off?

I see this working in a couple of places. Obviously there’s a great set-piece scene here for the ‘fun and games’ section in Act 2B of your screenplay, one of those ‘trailer moments’ you need to have. Two guys, sneaking around making this gun without anyone else knowing what they were up to, using the prison network to procure the various items they needed but without raising suspicion about what they were making – especially to the prison kingpin.

But there’s also a neat opening scene here where our hero is backed up against a wall in a no-win situation and he cobbles something like this together and shoots his way out of danger, ‘saving the cat’ on the way ;-) and something like that would be great to set-up this unique set of skills our hero has that would then pay-off big time later on in the movie as we reach our gripping finale.

So that’s enough, use the prison manufacture as a writing exercise if you want – it might unstick you from your current predicament – but stop reading now and get writing.

Cheers!

But from a writing perspective, what does it suggest?  If you were writing Science Fiction it could be a freezer full of body parts you can shop for, but where do they come from?  Is it the intact parts of dead folk that can be recycled?  And why is that one face staring directly at you? Maybe it isn’t dead yet, or in some morbid way, they are all alive, just sealed in for that fresh taste you know and love and if that’s the case, maybe there are other body parts you can buy, or they’re special-ordered in some way.

From a horror perspective it’s maybe a little easier, something like the sick and twisted act of a demented serial killer as he seeks dreadful vengeance in the local supermarket – and really, anyone who’s experienced supermarket shopping on a Saturday afternoon can quite understand how that would turn a usually timid, unassuming man into a rabid beast bent on the destruction of everything.

Finally there’s a comedy angle – maybe the face is alive, maybe it’s having a really bad day, it’s nose is bent out of shape and it can’t breathe properly and when you open up the wrapping it just starts moaning at you, which is not what you wanted at all and has quite put you off keeping it – think Woody Allen in Sleeper, the bit with the nose – you’ll soon see where that could go.

Anyway, that’s enough for this post, I’m not sure that this image has a direct line to a plot but I like it, and for that reason it’s the first of what will be many over the coming weeks and months.

Cheers!