So once upon a time, I had a sci-fi story I wanted to turn into a novel. I never wrote anything substantial for it, and what I did write, I wrote very early on, and it sucked ass. But the plot has never left me, and I draw the characters quite frequently.   It branched out in my head into three separate plots that were all vaguely connected. I just saw a trailer for a new sci-fi film, and some of the imagery reignited an interest in writing these stories.  I figured I’d roughly sketch out the plots (or at least ideas…they don’t really have set plots yet), so that I can refer to these.

These are just ROUGH SKETCHES. I don’t want them to become just another Pandora/Star Wars ripoff. I want to put ideas and suggestions in these to make people think a bit, andI won’t write a word until I’m happy that deeper meanings are there. 

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Mirage

This was the first story idea I’d had, and it started when I was ten or so, and evolved from there. I wanted to write a story which didn’t involve humans first arriving on a planet, but one which looked at the long-term effects of humanity upon their new home.

At this point, it revolves around a planet colonized by humans in the past, where they have settled in and cohabitate, if not peaceably, then nonviolently, with the native races.

The main native race are the Telo, who are quite humanoid in appearance, and therefore more accepted, though they are somewhat hostile. There is a flourishing trade between the cultures. However, there is a strict policy that no native races may interact with humans except for political delegations, and both sides uphold this.  Delegates who intermingle are in sterile suits, and interactions are only for very dire reasons.  As well, in open-air colonies, everyone must wear air-filters when outside. The accepted reason for this is that a very ugly and communicable disease can be carried by (but not affect) Telo, which humans can die from, and for which there is no found cure.Any human who removes their filter (or leaves a closed colony), is not permitted to return to/stay in the colony, but will also be sterilized before they may live amongst the Telo.  Someone who is found to have the disease is either killed or expelled.

Myra, and her twin siblings (the main characters) somehow (haven’t decided yet) remove their masks, and are duly kicked out. Since Myra is the daughter of one of the delegates, she is given a place to live with one of the head honchos, to work for them with her siblings as sort of housekeepers. Meanwhile, the siblings are aware that the disease is starting to break out in their colony. However, the Telo are having a bit of a problem of their own governmentally, with some of them wishing to kill the humans (shocker), some wishing to leave things as they are, and some actually wishing to intermingle with and blend the cultures. Ianji (the telo Myra is living with) is part of the losing faction, and they are all drawn into civil war, with Myra also struggling to find a cure for her colony.

Eventually the big reveal is that the Telo are so strangely humanoid because long in the past, when the humans first arrived, it turned out that the original race could interbreed with humans. Eventually, so many hybrids were created that the original race ceased to exist, and as more and more humanoids interbred, they lost more of their original traits and began to look like the humans. In desperation, they put in the santions that no human may interact with Telo unless they are sterilized and cannot breed, to save their culture from extinction. Hence, the faction that wishes to kill the humans hope that by only breeding with Telo, they can eventually return to their ancestral form. 

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Daymoon

This would be a prequel to Mirage  and would revolve around the first outbreaks of the plague and its effect on the lives of the colonies it is desecrating.  Eventually, it would parallel the events of Mirage but from the perspective of a different human colony, one that has found a way to halt the disease’s progress, but not reverse the effects. These characters are in Mirage as well, though I didn’t bother to mention  them above. Carolyn Erseacel is the reluctant figurehead-ish leader of the colony as her mother slowly dies of the disease, which she herself is also suffering from. It follows her and her friends’ lives before the outbreak (when she is a girl), to after the desecration, to the discovery of the “cure”, and her attempts as an older woman to help Myra’s colony, and her role in the Telo civil war.

I should discuss the disease here. It attacks the nerve endings and lungs. The lungs rot, causing a cough, and this is eventually what kills the invalid. However, the indicators of the disease are large patches of skin that may feel itchy, icy, or as if they are burning. They will become discolored, either bruise-like, or white-ish. As well, twitching and blindness, as well as hair-loss with reveal someone to have the disease. 

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Relics 

This is a veeeeerrrrrrrryyyy far back prequel to Mirage and Daymoon.  It chronicles the demise of the United States and humanity’s discovery and colonization of Mirage.  It starts with the collapse of the US gov’t., and its descent into semi-anarchy.  Most of the remaining populace believe that the entire world has fallen this way, and simply attempt to survive, though there are rumors of some who have escaped “over the wall” into Canada. The unnamed narrator, who was nearing eighteen when the collapse happened, is now in her early forties, a hardened, embittered woman who barely recalls what life was like before, but is one of the few remaining who can at all (most of the current populace were born afterwards, and lifespans are far shorter).  She has a better grasp on English than her contemporaries, because she keeps a journal in which she writes religiously, believing that if she can pour out her feelings there, she can keep herself sane when she must act cruelly or brutally in everyday life. 

It transpires that the rest of the world has not collapsed (or recovered…not sure yet), and simply cut off ties and quarantine the US. Space travel has advanced, and a colonizable planet has been discovered ( ‘…how long had I wondered at the bright pinpricks of light above my head. Now I knew they were my own brothers, off on their way to becoming gods or angels, while I crawled through the dust and filth like an ant.’).

It is decided that people from the US should be used for the first flight there, on the idea that they are expendable should something go wrong. The narrator is one of the ones chosen due to her remaining vestiges of humanity, and her ability to understand and connect with the rest of the countries. 

The rest of the novel follows the journey, colonization, interaction with the natives (the original Telo race, among others), and ends with the discovery that the Telos can interbreed with humans. The first few hybrid babies are born, and the narrator muses on what the future will hold for this new race. She secretly hopes that the colonists will all be absorbed into the Telo race, eventually leaving no trace of pureblood humanity on the planet.