One answer I’ve always liked to the question of where ideas come from, is that they’re often the result of chance combinations: two or more things that come together unexpectedly in your mind. Well, here are three that have been colliding lately in mine…

Long-term followers of this blog might conceivably remember this post, in which I linked to this article by Warren Ellis for Wired Magazine about Rescue Fiction. He talked about Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic puppet-animated tv series Thunderbirds and the potential for awesomeness of stories involving colossal and ambitious engineering: crisis, ingenuity, resolution and rescue.

That’s the first colliding thing. Here’s the second…

The Deepwater Horizon disaster: the rig explosion, the resulting catastrophic environmental damage to the Gulf of Mexico – and the unfolding story of the increasingly desperate attempts to come up with a solution when massive depth and crushing water pressure mean only remotely controlled machines can be used. Right now as I’m typing this – not to excuse BP or the other associated corporations for their part in creating this problem in the first place – some of the finest problem-solving minds on the planet are working against the clock. As this real-life case shows, engineering has drama.

Third colliding thing: this. It’s a post that appeared recently on one of my favourite blogs, Pink Tentacle, imagining some of the most fabulously ambitious engineering projects that the human race might conceivably engage in in its future, including floating cities, a space hotel and (my favourite) a plan to supply the entire world’s energy needs by means of a ring of solar panels on the moon.

Now: I have other books to write. I have my next two full-length projects lined up in my head already, and I don’t have the time or inclination to write this story right now. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t want to read it if it was written by someone else. Quite the reverse, in fact!

So, You, reading this now: how about it? How about writing some thrilling Rescue Fiction? I’m not talking about Thunderbirds, except how much I loved it when I was small, the world is already too full of sequels and remakes. No: I’m talking about you taking charge of this idea and writing something completely new and amazing.

…I know: having the idea is the easy bit. Or rather, once you’ve got your initial idea like this, you’ve then got to have more ideas: believable characters who have personal stakes in the story’s events, a satisfying structure, a way of telling this tale without too much exposition, plus all of the other bits and pieces you’ll need to thrash out so you can make the concept work.

But: I would love to read a near-future story of daring, ambition, spaceships, explosions and engineering ingenuity in the white heat of crisis. I think it would be awesome.

Someone write this. Please?

Sam

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