Clarke's Law

[bloodyrosemccoy]

God DAMMIT, Jeph Jacques:

"When you think about it, all fantasy novels are actually science fiction novels. Magic is just nanotech." - Hannelore's Twitter

Well, there goes the unique novel idea I was developing. Back to the drawing board.

Comments

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

Sufficiently advance science = magic.
Sufficiently analyzed magic = science.

And there are no unique ideas. If you're lucky enough to get into print first, the people who have been thinking of or working on it and just work slower are having that moment. And there are plenty of stories of people writing something and getting it into print (or putting it on TV or in a movie, for that matter) and only then finding out that someone else, somewhere, has already done something very similar that somehow had never made it to their attention before.

Neil Gaiman talks about this kind of thing. So do a lot of other writers and such, but I like Neil's way of thinking of how there's this cauldron of ideas and stories and such and everyone who writes dips a ladle in and pulls out what they want to use and puts it all together in their own way. And then that goes into the cauldron, too. I think he was speaking primarily of Sandman, or maybe American Gods, or maybe both, when he used that metaphor.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* True. I guess I just needed a moment of pouting, because I was sure that THIS time my idea was unique. MAYBE NEXT TIME

On the other hand, I'm pretty used to Poul Anderson having already had pretty much all of my ideas. So I guess this is nothing new.