Short Story Ideas

From time to time, I think of an idea for a short story. I don't actually want to write them — they interest me as ideas, not as stories — so I used to put them on my blog for other others to us. Several have done so, sometimes taking the idea in a direction that had not occurred to me.

I am now doing it here. If you decide to use one, let me know

Extended Child Care

You have a stasis box. About a week after the baby comes home from the hospital, a week of extreme sleep deprivation for both parents, you decide you need a little break. Put the baby in stasis for two days while you recover. Take it out and continue.

Gradually the breaks get longer — babies are a lot of work. You end up with the parents age seventy or so, the child two or three, and ... .

Tiffany M. Lee used this idea for a story.

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Childhood Innocence--the Extended Version

Over the past century or two, age of menarch has fallen quite a lot. Many parents do not regard this as a good thing. An eleven or twelve year old daughter is emotionally a child, biologically a woman. Problems.

With the progress of medicine, we now have a cure for this problem. That isn’t what puberty blockers are currently used for but it could be. You don't have to worry about your daughter getting pregnant at fourteen, because at fourteen she's still a child.

Fifteen? Sixteen? ...

Two variants:

One lets you slow physical aging. Perhaps it is how we greatly extend life expectancy — by slowing the aging processes, starting at age one. A twenty year old looks like a ten or twelve year old. Physically is a ten or twelve year old. Mentally — twelve-year-olds are as bright as adults, they just don't know as much. This one does. Emotionally? But it gets you to age 180.

The other is much less radical. Kittens are more fun than cats. If only they remained kittens longer. Much longer.

Wonders of modern medicine. For all I know someone has done it

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Home Sweet Home

Block of houses, all appearing identical. By each doorknob a light, red or green. Someone comes around the corner, goes to the first door with a green light, inserts his key, opens the door.

He is home, whichever house he chooses, because his key contains the complete description of the inside of his house when he left it that morning (or last week or last month or ...). The houses are all identical until a key goes in (red lights are occupied houses). Marvels of modern technology, probably nanotech.

Now we add one crazy person who thinks coming home to the same house matters, believes the identity of objects (and pets--possibly also children if we push it?) depends on continuity. So he does various things to try to get around the system everyone else takes for granted.

Someone used this idea for a story, and I like it; the final twist is not one that had occurred to me.

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Exit Exam

Patient in a doctor's office, getting a test which involves wiring patient to a machine. As the description and conversation continue, it becomes clear that the doctor's office is in a prison and this is part of the release procedure. The patient has just been acquitted and the prison wants to make sure he is healthy before they turn him lose.

Finally, the doctor tells the patient to hold still, and pushes a button. There is an instant of surprise in the patient's face as he slumps over dead.

At which point we discover that the patient was convicted, not acquitted — but doesn't know it. This is a very merciful society and they decided that although it was necessary to execute criminals they could at least be spared the horror of knowing that they were about to be executed.

Someone used this idea for a story, and I liked it.

[Someone online said that very similar merciful-execution scenarios are central to Bob Shaw's "In the Hereafter Hilton" (Omni 1980) and Robert Rohrer's "Keep Them Happy"(F&SF 1965). I haven't checked.

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How to Live Much Longer

Time is odd when you are dreaming. Sometimes the whole night goes by in a flash. Others, it seems like hours, but on the clock only a few minutes have passed.

Someone discovers that the phenomenon is real; subjective time can slow down when you are asleep and dreaming. Eight hours on the clock is forty or fifty in your head.

He reaches the obvious conclusion — and sets out to spend as large a fraction of his life as he can asleep.

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Deathbed Repentance

An idea that shows up in some Christian doctrine is that one's fate in the afterlife depends on the state of one's soul at the moment of death. The sinner who truly repents on his deathbed ends up, eventually, in heaven.

Imagine a technology for uploading a person, converting him from a program running on the wetware of his brain to an identical program running on silicon. When you are about to die you are uploaded instead, your body dies but you live. The software emulates you as you were when uploaded, with very limited ability to change the program thereafter. If you die angry, your silicon continuation is an angry person forever. If you die in a mood of repentance for your sins, on the other hand, your continuation is the good person that you (perhaps, absent death, very temporarily) were at that moment.

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