Dear All,
I have written a review of Annalee Newitz’s book, Autonomous, for your perusal at Minor Literature[s]. minorliteratures.com/2018/01/29/autonomous-by-annalee-newitz-johannes-punkt/
In the review, I proffer opinions on things like capitalism, slavery, and cyberpunk.
Best,
Johannes
Been a while since I did one of these. And NaNoWriMo is upon us — people might need inspiration? So, with some further ado.
Plots You Can Have is an ongoing series of posts where I give up stories for adoption. If any of these strike your fancy, please take them! And if you do write anything from this I would love to read it. For more posts, see: tag/plots-you-can-have
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The One Earth Rule
genre: political far-future sci-fi, elements of cyberpunk and whatever comes after cyberpunk, stylistically
Have you heard of the One China Policy? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-China_policy Individual countries don’t exist anymore. Essentially, this is an idea about spies and diplomats; there are two or more governments calling themselves “Earth” and they’re all layered, all claiming to be separate from each other. Countries are no longer mapped out on, well, maps, but in more abstract ways. Off-world super cruise spaceships for the ultra-rich have broken down and are now as chaotic as Earth, and diplomats and ambassadors are sent up to these spaceships all the time. Sometimes diplomats do what diplomats love to do: break all the laws, go hunting the most dangerous game (humans interbred with strange alien parasites that roam about these space cruise ships).
One of the abstract ways that countries are mapped out is by way of cultural accumulation. Museums steal from each other — the most tenacious works of art must be the most valuable ones — and the culture elite of any given “Earth” are always trying to influence the cultures of the other Earths, while claiming to only draw inspiration from their own country.
From this, things spin out of control, of course.
Two main plots that fuse together later: 1. a museum director is trying to organise a museum heist of the most epic proportions: they are fiddling with data in order to steal an entire museum building over to their Earth. 2. a dickish diplomat is hunting human-things on a space cruise and gets fucked by the data-fiddling that the museum director is doing. Arrested because his country stopped existing for a while, then robbed of communications networks and left to survive on the chaotic cruise, ze decides to find out who is doing this and enact revenge upon them. Lots of subplots about how countries are reacting to all this, and especially the cultural world. Museum in-fighting is mesmerizing to watch. If you don’t believe me, read up on the Elgin Marbles. …/wiki/Elgin_Marbles
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Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost 