So, current WIP is tropey AF. So far I've had:
—Protags have to rob their own tomb to recover a time capsule (Indiana Jones sequence with traps)!
—Escape from venomous mole rat swarm!
—Impersonating robots to dodge museum guards!
—New brain implants = backstreet brain slug replacements!
—Other protag in underwater battle against SHARKS with LASERS coming out of THEIR EYES
—Graveyard robbery!
—Villain's ranting monologue
And I'm only 20K words in.
What other pulpy goodness should I pursue?
Taking a cue from #TheStainlessSteelRat, one would have to have:
1. Time-travelling villain who turns out to be doomed from the start because xe actually has a closed loop worldline.
1. Snowball planet. Unexplainedly supports an advanced civilization.
And of course from a wider field of pulp there are many others:
1. Jungle planet, where absolutely everything will eat you, including even some of the rocks. Harrison and Foster did variations on this.
1. Marooned impossibly far from home, at the centre of a supervoid or something. Magically, just like every episode of the A-Team, there are resources from which one can improvise a getting-home machine. Smith did this one several times.
@robparsons
#SciFi
Can't do time travel (this setting leverages the setting of my 2010 Hugo-winning novella "Palimpsest": I already went there)
Jungle planet: I have plans.
Marooned in the void: kinda-sorta going there if by "marooned" you're willing to give me "got stuck somewhere electronics can't work". The setting is already mind-numbingly huge, don't need to dump the Bootes Void on it.
#EESmith gives you huge latitude on what counts as marooned, so you're alright.
In the #Skylark series one case was being so far across the universe that the mounting platform for the comms array had to be the size of a planet in order to damp vibration to the point that the beam wasn't wobbling across entire galaxies at the receiving end.
In the #Lensman series one case was being in a different universe where the speed of light was huge, and another was being so far across the multiverse that only True Love could locate which universe Our Hero was in.
Smith was all about going bigger in the next novel. (-:
@cstross @JdeBP @robparsons
Fit a shipwreck into a parking lot:
“Space travel across a galaxy only to get marooned in a blue town with no bar or bus service until Monday!”
Every time that you mention that I am reminded of a German #SciFi telly program from the 1990s called #Lexx.
In the second series, a maniac ends up imploding an entire universe by filling it with Von Neumann self-replicators that are single disembodied arms and concentrating them in a single place.
Canada gave us Dark Matter. The U.S.A. gave us Vagrant Queen cancelled just when it was about to get really good, and the godawful Pandora that wasn't cancelled soon enough. Germany gave us The Lexx.
One of the characters is a sex slave who is accidentally combined with predator lizard DNA, and who sleeps with anyone but one bloke; and another is an undead mind-wiped assassin for a mad theocrat. Right up your street, I suspect. (-:
@JdeBP @cstross @robparsons I will second all three of those shows. They are on my treasured list and I consider the penultimate episode of Vagrant Queen to be my favorite.
And my entire household is still bitter about Dark Matter ending.
Charlie Stross
rob
JdeBP
AccordionBruce
D. Moonfire
Bjørnar (he/him)