Writing Ideas
So in the imaginary world I travel through, I think I'll someday commit to writing sconce fiction. I had a writing prompt from Neal Stephenson's “Cryptonomicon.” In one scene the hero is headed to the Phillipine jungle following geo coordinates from an anonymous source. After a long drive on pretty awful roads past a lot of checkpoints of slightly dubious officialdom, he arrives at an unremarkable spot. Middle of nowhere, nothing but jungle, laying right on the ground and covered only by decades of growth, lie two coffin-sized ingots of gold. The point of the exercise was to show our hero just how mind-numbingly powerful the anonymous source was that he could give away the combination to the vault with full knowledge that our hero (and no one less powerful) could do nothing to exploit these riches.
So I keep thinking of this idea of all powerful something within reach but utterly beyond grasp. I like the big ingots of gold because they themselves resist all exploitation by simply being massive. The variation I keep toying with is you walk out to your back yard one morning and there's a car-sized lump of iridium. The fun here is that the average person would have to go research just how valuable this find would be. (Very. Country-sized wealth.) The irony or the limiting factor on this is iridium is damn near the densest metal there is, so it will sink. And not exactly slowly. So our hero is left with the prospect of...well, really no prospects at all. I'm pretty sure US citizens don't have their own mineral rights, and worse yet urban dwellers don't get the same land surface rights. Finally, even if our unfortunate Joe kept the rights to this bounty, the giant corporations needed to exploit it would take the lion's share of the worth, and worse yet, leave him holding the bag for things like environmental mitigation.
I delight in the presentment of an utterly perplexing situation, the initial discovery of its surface characteristics (and resulting cartwheels), followed by the slow dawning of the real richness of the event (and hopefully, fullest enlightenment.)
I think the attraction lies with the way I figure out the world: initial observation (wtf?), first-order realization (wtfh?), and then at some remove, the final dawning of the full picture including my feelings and maybe what others felt (ahhh!).
It's all well and good, this Sherlock MacGyver stuff (hey, there's a new character idea) and we all delight in the title: ““rousing simplicity of the solution after 5 commercial breaks and before the end credits roll. But in reality, almost nothing ever yields to the first-order observation. Certainly very few lasting solutions are created. Most often, that's a blundering sort of move that friends forgive the side effects of and strangers focus on using to hate. It's only a bit later that we figure it out.
And that's the fun of the scene from Cryptonomicon.
But me, I'm hung up on how to land a car-sized lump without destroying a decent portion of a large continent and killing all life on earth. Tricky.