It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
Computational Literature
Early on, computer programming was valued for its practical uses. It overturned industry and transformed society. It was deemed a science, even if computer science wasn’t as rigorous as physics or chemistry.
There were always those who saw the artistry in programming, the code golfers, makers of esoteric languages, and high-minded software architects. But what does artistry matter in the face of trillion-dollar industries and socioeconomic upheaval?
That was before Gustav Nacht, classical painter turned web designer. In retrospect, it’s clear that his genius was on par with greats like Mozart, Nabokov, or Van Gogh. At the time, nobody took his School for Computational Literature seriously.
Nacht pioneered programming languages that were as expressive for humans as they were for computers. Ernest was a language as terse and evocative as the writing of Hemingway, while Faulkner was a language as verbose, complex, and non-linear as the stories of its namesake.
It took decades, but by the time of Nacht’s death, non-programmers reading computational literature had become commonplace, and the ability to program finally seemed destined to become ubiquitous, as more and more people discovered these accessible gateways into the practice.
Nacht’s best students carried on his work, and while some fans might suggest that nobody would ever attain the same artistic heights as Nacht himself, most readers found subsequent generations even more enjoyable.
I received CBR+PNK (“cyber plus punk”) as a holiday gift, and while I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, half the fun of TTRPGs is in leafing through the materials, enjoying the art, and trying to figure out how the rules fit together and how it will actually play.
CBR+PNK bills itself as “Cyberpunk one-shots forged in the dark.” It gets its story DNA from its namesake, Cyberpunk, the gritty dystopic future setting that has recently found fresh life in the popular Cyberpunk 2077 video game and Cyberpunk RED core rules update. However, its rules are based on a stripped-down version of Blades in the Dark, a fiction-first, fast and simple ruleset with a core mechanic of rolling d6 pools.
The Package
CBR+PNK is clearly broadcasting its goal of being a light, low-prep, pick-up-and-go game. The form factor is less than half the bulk of a typical core rule book; a slick little fold-out box filled with laminated pamphlets, all held together by a sturdy sleeve.
The lamination means these should stand up well to the typical abuses of game nights, including spilled drinks. It also allows players and GM to mark up their pamphlets with whiteboard markers and reuse them across sessions.
The left fold of the packet contains includes a “GM protocols” pamphlet and 5x player “runner files”—a combination character sheet and mini instruction manual. The right half contains a variety of odds and ends: optional mechanics, settings and runs.
The Framework
The players play as criminal or semi-criminal agents, mercenaries with specialized skill sets who might come together for assassinations, heists, sabotage, or other high-stakes operations at the behest of shadowy contacts promising huge payouts.
Unlike games that cater more to long campaigns where player characters can grow over months or years, the characters in CBR+PNK are veterans on their last mission, hoping to finish the run and get out of the game alive.
There are some optional rules for running CBR+PNK campaigns over multiple sessions (and supplements to that effect on Itch.io), but it’s tailored for one-shots, and I suspect the rules might feel thin in places for a long story across many missions.
As part of initial setup, each character has an “angle.” Are they out for revenge? Trying to buy a luxury flat to get their family out of the slums? Paying off a bookie? Searching for a missing friend?
At the end of the run, each player decides how they will leverage the results of the mission to try to satisfy this broader character goal, then rolls a special skill check with various bonuses. This is the final payoff or disaster.
Setup
The game is designed to be low-stress for the GM. That’s achieved in three ways—few rules, spreading some load to players, and minimizing prep.
It’s suggested that the GM figure out the mission objective, a couple locations and assets (people, data, vehicles, etc.), and 3-6 obstacles that players may have to overcome.
Players come up with their character’s name, look and “angle,” then assign points to the four “approaches” (broad attributes like Aggressive and Smart) and the 11 “skills” (narrow attributes like Close Combat and Coding). All of these attributes max out at 2, keeping bookkeeping simple.
Players also pick a cybernetic augmentation and a Load of Small (3), Medium (5), or Heavy (7), which impacts how much they can carry, but also how fast, conspicuous, and stealthy they are.
That’s about all that’s needed to start the game.
Play
Play revolves around three primary mechanics: Action Rolls, Stress, and Harm.
When a player tries to do something risky or difficult, they make an action roll. The GM decides the threat (risk) level, consequences of failure, and effect of success. Players can try to shift this equation to their advantage with gear or tactics, and the GM can increase the difficulty by doing the same for the bad guys. The player can also choose to simultaneously boost both risk and reward.
The roll uses a pool of d6s based on the sum of the Approach and Skill used and takes the highest roll(s). Rolling multiple 6s is a critical success, a single 6 is regular success, 4-5 is partial success with negative consequences, and 1-3 is outright failure. This basic system should feel very familiar to anyone who has played Forged in the Dark or Powered by the Apocalypse games.
Stress is a penalty pool that players can fill (up to 7) to get a variety of benefits. They can Push their own action or Assist another player’s action to add dice for an action or improve the effect. They can activate a cybernetic augmentation. Or they can perform a Flashback.
Flashbacks are a fun mechanism for coming up with new fiction on the spot. The player gets to describe something that happened before the mission that impacts the current action or predicament (and presumably helps them). The GM decides the Stress cost based on how outlandish this gamified retcon is.
Gear works similarly, but without the stress cost. Players decide they packed an item when they need it. The only caveat is that you can’t produce more gear from your pack than your Load number allows.
Harm is what often (but not always) happens when the characters fail an action, and it’s a replacement for more common hit point systems in other games. It’s a three-level system where L1 is superficial damage, L2 is serious injury, and L3 is severe. Stacking multiple lower-level harms results in an injury the next level up. L4 kills the character.
The Extras
The FRAMEWORK pamphlet is an odd combination of rules clarifications, quick lists for GMs, and rules for an odd campaign mode built around a series of session-long flashbacks. It feels like this really wanted to be part of the GM pamphlet and ran into the limitations of the form factor.
The HUNTERS pamphlet provides optional mechanics for what amounts to boss enemies, and seems like a pretty cool thing to add to a run once you’ve got the hang of the basics.
The +WEIRD pamphlet is a build-your-own Shadowrun, adding some light fiction to bring magic into the world, meta-human backgrounds, and magical abilities that slot into the character sheet just like cybernetic augments. It’s another set of optional rules, but trying to do a lot more than HUNTERS. It feels a little slim for what it’s trying to do, which is a lot.
The PRDTR pamphlet provides a setting—a base on Ganymede where a worker insurgency fights against corporate overlords. The colony is falling apart, infested with out-of-control mutant jungle and an engineered living weapon (definitely not the trademarked alien from Predator). It includes several starting points and missions, NPCs, a simple graph-map of locations on the base, and random events. All in all, a nice selection of components to build a mission from. A team synergy mechanic is also included, but this didn’t seem to add much, and I’d consider not bothering if I was running it.
The Mona Rise Megalopolis pamphlet is a very different take on a setting, with random tables for just about everything randomizable in this simple game, packed with what I assume are references to characters and locations from William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Unfortunately I haven’t read those books, and this falls pretty flat as a stand-alone artifact without that context.
Finally, the Mind the Gap pamphlet is a complete example run, with a fun bubble-story setting, a simple three-act structure, and a twist. My biggest pet peeve for TTRPGs is when they don’t provide examples of play to help understand the game flow and rules, and this goes a long way in that regard.
Final Thoughts
This package is cool and slick, but also limiting. They’ve crammed every millimeter of these quad-fold pamphlets with text, and in some cases it feels like another page or two would have been beneficial.
As a prospective GM, I had to jump between all the pamphlets and do some internet searching to understand threat/effect and harm. Harm is the one case where the game makes a choice that I think adds significant complexity over other common mechanics like HP and well-defined status effects.
Like many, I cut my teeth on D&D. These days, I really like the FitD/PbtA style of fast, low-rules, fiction-first play. It’s so much less intimidating than running something like a D&D campaign whether that be from a book or homebrew.
That said, they also have limitations. I haven’t run a longer campaign in one of these systems, but I expect it would feel very different from something crunchier.
I’ve been looking for something relatively easy to play with the kids, so I expect I’ll find time to play this sometime in 2026. I’ll post a follow-up when I do.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
Exposure Therapy
The Virtual Experience Technology was designed by neuroscientists and psychologists, manipulating magnetic fields at the brain surface without all of that messy wiring directly into the neural tissue. It could not only generate incredibly detailed sensory inputs, but could also modify the subject’s sensation of time passing. Coming from the sphere of brain science, it’s only natural that it would find its first use as a therapeutic tool.
No, of course it couldn’t modify memory. Not directly. But it could simulate real experiences, so real that they were nearly indistinguishable from life. Even better, these waking dreams could distill hours or days into seconds and minutes. Patients suffering from traumas and phobias could be walked through dozens of carefully designed scenarios in a single treatment session, physically safe at a clinic.
Corporations and militaries noted how effective the V.E.T. was for training. A few used it for interviews, condensing weeks of on-the-job observation into a few hours. And why not apply the same standards to those who were already hired? Why not condense more work into less physical time?
Advocates for justice reform suggested that prison sentences could be effectively commuted by living them out under V.E.T., completing them in a tiny fraction of the real-world time. Advocates for harsher sentencing suggested using similar techniques to stretch sentences into hundreds or thousands of experiential years. If a depraved serial killer was sentenced to a dozen life sentences, why shouldn’t they experience all of them?
Intelligence services quietly adopted the technology to trick subjects into revealing key information. And when the tricks didn’t work, there were whole suites of horrific torture designed to make people talk. No more messy real-world war crimes. These were invisible and undetectable, leaving only mental scars.
It was only reasonable and right that international tribunals put a stop to those horrible practices. Thank goodness they did. The CIA and FSB, MI6 and Mossad, and the Chinese MSS all pledged to shut down those divisions. Notoriously transparent organizations. Happy to let the inspectors double-check their work. They always followed the rules.
Haruki Murakami is a bestselling Japanese author whose novels have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s one of those literary writers who lives in the borderlands of literary magical realism and sci-fi/fantasy. My first introduction to his work was the monstrous tome 1Q84, which is almost 1200 pages.
Novelist as Vocation is a book about writing, but if you’re hoping for a technical manual or detailed tips on voice or pacing, this is not the book for you. The closest analogue I’ve read is Stephen King’s On Writing.
King’s book is half memoir, half writing advice. Murakami’s book also has a memoir component, but any writing advice is almost incidental. Murakami seems loathe to put himself on a pedestal with the implication that his advice might be valuable, but he does describe his writing process in some detail.
The book is split into a dozen chapters, each one standing alone and covering a different topic. Half of these chapters started life as essays Murakami wrote years ago and set aside, eventually being published as a serial feature in a Japanese literary magazine. The rest were written later to fill out the book.
For those who are fans of Murakami, the chapters “Are Novelists Broad-Minded” and “Going Abroad – A New Frontier” provide the most history of his career and insight into the man and his view of the world. For those seeking concrete advice, the chapters “So, What Should I Write About?” and “Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel” give an overview of the author’s entire process leading up to, writing, and rewriting a novel.
If nothing else, Novelist as Vocation reinforces the common view of Murakami as a successful author who never quite fit into the literary establishment in Japan or internationally. He comes across as idiosyncratic and sometimes odd, having never been formally trained, and making a start at writing much later in life than many of his literary peers. Getting a glimpse of the man through these chapters, it seems almost obvious that this would be the person behind these unusual novels.
Murakami is self-deprecating and self-important in turns, on the one hand brushing off some critics’ poor reviews of his works and style, but then bringing it up so often that I can’t help but think it hurts him more than he would like to admit. He knocks his own writing as nothing special, but also repeatedly calls back to the prize he won for his first novel and his broad success since then. If nothing else, the fact that he wrote this book about his own life and writing has a certain egoism built into it.
Murakami also serves as a good reminder for any writer who is worried about not having an MFA, worried about starting later in life, or simply feeling like an outsider in the literary world: there are many definitions of and paths to success in writing, and we should not be discouraged or afraid to forge our own way.
At 138 words, this is not quite drabble-length, so it needs to hit hard and fast. It’s a story about the loss of someone loved, with the sci-fi element being their replacement by an artificial duplicate.
The opening is a metaphor unfurling: salt as grief. The end is a callback to the title. Great structural choices for micro-fiction.
The mix of italics and quotes is something I’ve done myself, but it’s dangerously ambiguous. Is the robot speaking non-verbally? Is it the protagonist’s internal voice of their lost loved one? Any lack of clarity can be catastrophic in a story so short.
The theme is imminently relatable; we’ve all experienced loss of a loved one, by death or lesser proxy. I don’t quite get that gut-punch emotional reaction I want from a short story, but that’s always the biggest challenge of micro-fiction, where you are fighting for every word.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
The Corporate Cold War
When the history books were written, the story started with an exodus of intellectuals and policymakers from the United States and Britain. Their failure to effectively change the festering kleptocracies of their native lands only galvanized them to fight even harder for the more favorable battleground of the EU.
The opening salvo was the unexpected passage of laws that set hard limits on the size of corporations by employee count, profit, and revenue. Any company too large would have to split up. These limits would tighten over time, and any uncompliant company could do no business within the economic block.
The first front of the war was political, with multinational corporations spending billions to influence elections and run ad campaigns. They threatened to abandon Europe, an empty threat, knowing how much it would cost them. They claimed prices would skyrocket. But they underestimated the public vitriol against them.
When political wrangling failed make the problem go away, a legal arms race began. The corps found a hundred ways to split one company into many while maintaining total control and channeling profits to the same shareholders. Regulators updated the rules, and the corporations changed structure again. It took decades of closing loopholes to see the laws really go into effect.
Some of the corps followed through on their warnings, leaving the EU altogether and eating the loss. Others divested themselves of their European branches. But some of the biggest, loudest corporations gave in and broke up in a sudden cascade of shocking announcements. The continent celebrated.
However, the elite shareholder class had been busy consolidating their power in America, Britain, and parts of Asia. As their influence waned in the EU, elsewhere the lines between corporate and political power blurred and fell away.
This, the history books said, was what led to the worldwide split into two socioeconomic blocs: a new cold war. And if there was one thing the gleeful intellectuals of the EU underestimated, it was the amount of bloodshed the rich would embrace to keep their wealth and power. The rhetoric became increasingly violent, demanding that the “continent of socialists” accept “true capitalism” into their borders, no matter the cost.
Armies rallied along the borders. Fingers hovered over the controls that would launch fleets of missiles and drones. And the doomsday clock ticked forward: five seconds to midnight…
Xenocide is the third book in the Ender series, after Ender’s Game (link) and Speaker for the Dead (link). I read the book decades ago, and remembered almost nothing about it. I’m now reading it again with my daughter.
The plot is split between two worlds and sets of characters. On the planet Lusitania, the story of Speaker for the Dead continues, with Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, his AI companion Jane, and the Ribeira family that he has now joined through his marriage to their matriarch, Novinha. Soon, Ender’s sister Valentine and her family arrive as well.
The Lusitanians, including the native Pequeninos and imported Buggers, live under the looming threat of an approaching fleet armed with the planet-destroying MD device, as well as the constantly shifting threat of the descolada virus that is integral to the Pequenino life cycle, but eventually deadly to all non-native species. The fleet is held back temporarily by Jane, who disables all their communications at the risk of revealing herself to the universe at large.
On the planet Path, we’re introduced to Han Fei-tzu, an important official, and his genius daughter, Han Qing-jao. They are members of the planet’s high caste, the godspoken, whose intelligence is linked to OCD-like compulsions that the populace believe to be the way the gods speak to mortals.
Fei-tzu is tasked by the congress of the hundred worlds to solve the riddle of the fleet near Lusitania, which seems to have suddenly disappeared. He assigns this important task to his daughter. Soon they are joined by one more character—Si Wang-mu, a servant girl who is not godspoken, but also turns out to be highly intelligent.
** More Planets, More Problems
Ender’s Game was clearly intended as a single novel that stands on its own. Speaker for the Dead was decidedly more complicated, and left a pile of unresolved plot points to pick up in Xenocide.
Despite this “head start,” the first half of Xenocide feels plodding, and it mostly involves setting up a large number of major problems that the characters are going to have to solve, along with a web of reasons why absolutely every character is going to be at odds with every other character.
Conflict can be an engine of story, but Xenocide proves to me that it can go too far. I couldn’t help feeling that the constant animosity between characters was exhausting, and when certain characters finally gave in and decided to work with others near the end of the book, it felt abrupt and somewhat unearned.
** Thinking Fast and Slow
The first half of the book is slow, and it would be easy to blame this entirely on the setup required by the huge cast of characters and the many interconnected conflicts. That is absolutely a factor, and I think this book was trying to do a few too many things at once. However, I think a lot of this is actually just Card being long-winded and having too much editorial clout at this point in his career.
There are pages of internal narration where characters muse on their feelings. These deep thoughts are sometimes interrupted by one or two lines of dialogue, only to immediately drop back into more pages of their thoughts! If there was ever an argument against a third-person omniscient perspective, this is it. A first-person narrator or even a tight third-person would have limited these long and winding detours and perhaps forced Card to show how characters feel more through their actions and words.
By contrast, the latter half of the book ramps into a much faster pace. All of those problems set up in the first half have to get resolved. Unfortunately, this leads to another problem of pacing, where everything feels like it’s happening overly fast. Again it feels like there was simply too much going on, and some plot points inevitably got short shrift.
To me, some of the resolutions felt like an abrupt tonal shift. This is a far-future series with advanced technology, but felt like hard sci-fi grounded in reality. Near the end of Xenocide, ideas are introduced that are decidedly further afield. There is a brand new kind of magical physics. When the whole plot hinges on these ideas, there’s a whiff of deus ex machina—even if they would feel perfectly reasonable in a story that plays a little looser with its sci-fi extrapolations.
It’s been long enough since I read this series that I no longer remember anything about the fourth book, Children of the Mind. Without spoiling Xenocide, I’ll say that the final bit of sci-fi magic also brings a pair of characters more or less back from the dead, further complicating an already over-complicated book, and I suspect they’ll be heavily involved in the conclusion.
This may be the first inkling of Card’s eventual obsession with rehashing his old stories. It would continue with his “Shadow Saga,” where he spends another six books rehashing plots and characters from the Ender books. I see from Wikipedia that there are at least 19 books in this same world.
** New Perspective
When I originally read these books, I was a teen. Those memories are fuzzy now, but as far as I recall, I found them to be a powerful vision of a distant future.
Re-reading now, I think that’s true of Ender’s Game. But Xenocide feels far less grounded and almost metaphorical. The conflicts, from interpersonal to intergalactic, largely boil down to people talking at cross-purposes, unable or unwilling to understand each other’s viewpoint. It’s ultimately a depressing view of the world that suggests real empathy and compromise is almost a super power, and most conflict is inevitable. It’s depressingly resonant here in 2025.
If there is a central theme across Xenocide’s many plotlines, it’s that people and cultures tend to act in ways that make them dangerous to themselves and each other. Humans are easily controlled or manipulated, and often give in to their most base instincts, even when it’s obviously bad for them.
We see evidence of that on the nightly news, but it’s far more depressing to imagine that we’ll still be so barbaric and unenlightened in three thousand years.
** Final Thoughts
In an appropriate twist, Xenocide leaves me conflicted. It does a number of things that irritate me. I’m still of the opinion that Ender’s Game was the best book in the series. But Xenocide incorporates a lot of strange and provocative ideas, and it has made me think. It comes from an era when the genre conventions of sci-fi expected intricate plotting and…less intricate characterization. So the complexities of the plot can perhaps be forgiven, and the characterization, as heavy-handed as it sometimes is, should perhaps be praised.
Once upon a time, I would likely have considered these books among my favorites. I don’t think they still hold that place. They’re by no means bad, but I do think the state of literature has changed significantly in the past 25 years, as have my own personal tastes. I’m enjoying my foray through the series, even if I do have the old man tendency to complain the whole way. And there has to be merit to any book that you find yourself thinking about well after you’re done reading it.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
Bad Music
There was a long-running debate among fans of the band Bad Music. Were they the most punk of the “neo-unda” punk bands, or were they marketing geniuses who truly understood how much people wanted something that was impossible to get?
The name of the band was designed to make it difficult for internet searches. Their shows were never announced more than one day in advance. Everyone entering the venue had to go through tech scanners and put their phones and smart glasses into the block of modular mini-lockers that seemed to travel with the band. They wore masks on stage and never revealed their names. And holy hell did they rock.
They had no label, and they claimed that they didn’t release records. Fans competed to post the highest quality bootleg tracks. There were eternal arguments over which songs were legit, and which were made by copycats and fakers.
At the height of their fame, debates raged over whether “unreleased” songs could win a Grammy while Bad Music topped the charts on every streaming platform. Then the band vanished. No more popup shows. No more cryptic announcements on the “cool” niche music sites.
New songs surfaced here and there, but they were widely regarded as fakes. An expose in The Guardian made tenuous connections, claiming to have tracked two of the anonymous band members to a suicide cult, and two more to a plane crash in Brazil.
The songs remained popular in the ensuing decades. The band’s disappearance only fueled their legend. Conspiracy theories abounded, and many fans were convinced that the band was still alive. Lookalike cover groups became popular, with some even insisting that they were the real deal, back from the dead.
Every year or two, someone claimed the band had reappeared for one last secret show in an unexpected place.
I purchased this as The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1 double feature—which contains the first two novellas in the series—so I immediately jumped into this story after completing All Systems Red.
While the first story in a series has to introduce characters, introduce a setting, and set the tone, this is really not very different from the requirements of a stand-alone story. The only additional thing a good series-starter needs is some dangling plot threads that can be used to pull the reader into subsequent entries. As a reader, my question for a series is always, “what’s my reason for reading the next story?”
All Systems Red did this setup well, ending with Murderbot sneaking away from the new friends that had just bought its freedom from the oppressive Company. It knows that its memory was wiped after an incident at a mining colony; an incident where many people died and it was first able to override the governor module that keeps all security bots under strict control. It feels compelled to return and learn the truth about what happened.
The ART of Security Consulting
This second installment begins to set up Murderbot as the travelling tough guy in the mold of classic ronin samurai stories and westerns. Murderbot is Jack Reacher with social anxiety, 50% artificial components, and (ironically) actual emotions.
As far as we can tell, Murderbot seems to be pretty good at its job. It knows how to hack the local security systems to avoid being spotted as it makes its way through space stations. It disguises itself as an augmented human, and tries to secure passage off-the-books by finding automated transports with no human passengers to be suspicious.
Unfortunately, a deep space research vessel that Murderbot uses for transportation turns out to have an advanced artificial brain, and once he’s aboard it immediately clocks him as suspicious and forces him to reveal who he really is. What follows is a strange and decidedly awkward relationship with the ship, who Murderbot eventually dubs ART—Asshole Research Transport.
ART eventually helps Murderbot develop a cover story as a security consultant and even helps modify Murderbot’s body in its emergency surgery bay to help it avoid detection. It also ends up acting much like the classic hacker in the protagonist’s earpiece for the ensuing heist.
Murderbot, seemingly unable to avoid human entanglements, ends up taking a security job for a group of out-of-their-depth researchers trying to get their intellectual property from a shady mining corporation. This serves as cover for Murderbot’s actual goal of finding information about the mining colony massacre.
A Lack of Loose Ends
After two volumes, my impression of the Murderbot Diaries is that it’s more comfort food than high-brow sci-fi pushing the boundaries of the genre. That’s not a critique. Now seems like a time when plenty of readers could use some lighter, comforting stories.
Martha Wells has assembled a number of recognizable tropes and familiar ideas in the story so far. But they’re put together in a way that feels fresh, and mixed in with the mild goofiness of a surprisingly effective security bot who prefers to avoid human contact and binge watch its favorite shows instead.
Unfortunately, I felt that the ending of Artificial Condition didn’t quite measure up to All Systems Red. There was a whiff of deus ex machina in the sudden appearance of a character that happens to neatly resolve the concerns of Murderbot’s scientist clients. Murderbot does eventually find some information about the mining colony massacre and its own origin, but nothing is fully explained, and there are no clues as to where it could learn more. I would have liked one or two obvious threads to draw me into the third novella.
Artificial Condition expands the world, introduces new characters, and lets us get further into the head of Murderbot. It also feels like a comfortable stopping point to me, at least for now. The ending doesn’t compel me to keep reading, and maybe that’s okay. I will probably jump back in when I feel the need for some cozy, lighthearted action-adventure.
For now, this volume goes on the bookshelf, and I’ll pick up something else from my TBR list.
It’s a common misconception that a great idea makes a great story. The truth is that most great stories come down to execution. A great idea with poor execution rarely works, but a great writer can breathe new life into even the most tired tropes.
Like any writer, I have my own treasure trove of ideas that might end up in a story…someday. But why horde them? Instead, I’m opening the vault and setting them free.
Feel free to use these ideas as a writing prompt, or come up with your own twist and reply in the comments.
The Holy App
Caleb Ortiz-Levin made a career through the boom and bust cycles of Silicon Valley. Increasingly desperate bids to sell cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and everything AI. And what did he have to show for it? Only a few billion dollars.
Everyone was shocked when he stepped away from business.
He climbed remote mountains to study at isolated monasteries. He obtained three theological degrees. He brought his cadre of spiritual advisors to every gold plate charity dinner and political fundraiser. He spent six months not speaking. He interviewed the Pope and the Dalai Lama in the New Yorker.
Caleb wasn’t a fool. He knew how he was viewed: just another rich tech bro going down some obsessive rabbit hole. He didn’t mind. It just meant that he would be on the cutting edge of the next big thing: personalized religion.
People were increasingly desperate for meaning in a meaningless world. Why settle for an ethical system written on stone tablets in the bronze age? Why accept a cosmogony developed by shepherds before the invention of telescopes?
The app was downloaded a hundred million times in the first week. It made it easy to register a new religion, set up a hierarchy, and ordain your own priests. All with AI auto-complete, recorded indelibly on the blockchain. People began to wonder how the old religions survived without push notifications and subscription fees.
The two Churches of Satan, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Hatsune Miku vied for the most adherents in the weekly rankings. The pope denounced it as a tool of the devil. Oddly, this only caused a spike in downloads. Within a year, all the major religions were on the app too.
When Caleb went on the podcast circuit, he was asked one question more than any other: “What do you believe?”
Words Deferred 