Where I'm gonna go with this

So my pops has convinced me that it would be easier for me to put together a novel if there were some guidelines guiding me along some lines. He's been rambling about that cybernetic dog and his bounty hunter companion for years now, so I figured that I would give it a shot. He's thinking 255 pages- no prob.

So the next little detail is to generate the aspects of fiction that can be identified with. I have a multitude of topics I'd love to cover: war, love, biology, chemistry, physics, racism, faith and transhumanism. I can't do all of those in 255 pages, and my dad would love to see my treatment of the transhumanism angle, so I think I'll also add racism and be done with it.

The overbearing issue for me and sci-fi is the datedness of many of the great works out there. A prime example is Asimov and his Foundation series. I couldn't get into it when I tried around 1993 because nuclear power (fission) is considered the ultimate technology, and coal is the next best thing for most planetary economies. In my humble opinion, this shows both an inaccurate picture of future energy sources and a severe anthropocentrism. There is no reason to believe that simply because we have fossil fuels in abundance on earth that the same would exist anywhere else. And we already know that fusion reactors will be the next great energy source, followed by some sort of galactic wind mill. But I get ahead of myself.

Anthropocentrism is a hard one, because writing about aliens with alien motivations is uninteresting. But I want to avoid the Star Trek trap where aliens look exactly like humans but with some (evolutionary advantageous?) forehead, nose or cheek ridges. So I have to avoid both inaccurate predictions and anthropocentric extraterrestrials. I have an idea, though, and I call it Plott World.

Plott World is home to Plott City, a sprawling Petalopolis (Latin in your face!) with extradimensional connections. It will be readily apparent that some of these connections could lead to various points in earth history, so Plott City and earth are influenced by the same Universe-spanning megaculture. In this way I can have an Earth-like futuristic setting that can be identified with, but if any predictions don't come true it won't ruin the story.

I'm also going to stick in a bunch of ancient earth stuff, like angels, Bodhisattva, enlightenment, Hebrew and Sanskrit to suggest that such concepts are universal, and are concepts that Plott World and Earth share. That should take care of the reader-identification part.

Next we gotta add the transhumanism. So there will be a country outside of Plott City on Plott World that is composed entirely of Buddhists and lead by a Bodhisattva. They are anti-augmentation, for it ruins their paths to enlightenment. I'll also add a ruling echelon in Plott city that wants nothing more than to convert the useless heathens of the sprawl into efficient cyber-citizens. There's the transhuman conflict- the choice between possible enlightenment, based on faith, or certain mundane happiness through augmentation.

Then the racism. I'm going to create a race that will be obviously akin to terrestrial African Americans. This race will have had a great and flourishing culture, but a handful of individuals have been forced into servitude in Plott City, and it is illegal to teach their descendants about their previous culture. After a few generations, with all culture lost, the race will be freed from their service. Then there can be a conflict as to whether or not the race in question is genetically without culture or if it is the fault of the slave holders.

And, in the middle of all this, a bounty hunter with a cybernetic dog. I love a creative challenge.