Episode 504: Science Fiction Ideas!

Just got back from the Keeno Kino Warwick Student Film Festival, which was an interesting experience. I can't pretend to say that I understood all of the films that I saw, but I really enjoyed the one Adriana did for her film-making course last year, as well as Simon's very convincing film about an anthropologist who is driven mad by his contemplations. On the way back, I randomly started thinking about ideas for an epic science fiction series. By ideas, I mean I've actually mentally written out the publisher's blurb/summary that's going on the back cover. Haha! I've got three specific ideas that could be tied together in a continuous timeline, or could exist as three separate stories. Firstly, a society in which uploading of one's consciousness is commonplace, even before death, and these consciousnesses are regarded as independent legal entities. The catch? They're capable of producing virtual offspring as well, by exchanging fragments of their personalities. What happens when reproduction is no longer limited by natural resources, but simply by how much computing power and memory space you have? Can the corporeal humans compete? The second idea has to do with technologies like terraforming and planet construction. What would happen if human technology advanced to the point where these were realities, allowing humanity to spread to the rest of the Solar System, with the catch that we are the first spacefaring race with such abilities and attract the attention of envious aliens? This one's slightly more problematic, since I haven't thought of a good reason why humans should be the only ones, or at least the first, to develop these technologies. The last idea's relatively simpler, and involves the appearance of a genetic mutation that grants a select group of people the ability to manipulate reality, earning them the ire of adherents of all the major world religions who consider the existence of humans with godlike powers to be blasphemy. Now imagine what would happen if one of these mutants was a religious person too. These are all just some random ideas that I've been throwing around in my head, and I'll probably never get around to putting them down on paper, knowing my aversion to writing long pieces. So much for raking in the dollars...