Ask HN: Burning idea for a story you've always wanted written?

An alternate history in which Bill Gates is killed in a car accident in Albuquerque back when Microsoft is just getting started. What would the computer industry have looked like?

A world where nikola tesla has business acumen

A book about a guy who crowdsources idea for a book, and ultimately decides that the story will be about a guy crowdsourcing ideas for a book.

Repeat indefinitely.

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Alternatively, outsource several trillion monkeys to type apparently random characters until you are left with a work that is more intelligent than Huxley, more potent than Shakespeare, and wittier than Stephen Fry.

An alternate history where smallpox does not exist in Europe, and instead travels from the new world back to Europe. Thus the Inca empire is never destroyed and the Americas are never colonized.

First person narrative of a modern day man with innate knowledge that he is in fact the "Son of God" (Jesus) and that the modern Judeo-Christian religions are man made creations. The story is the Christ story, but placed now, the tone is like Kafka, with not necessarily the expected outcome we are familiar.

Imagine if Hell were a sort of financial market. Demons trade soul futures, essentially betting on the future price of souls, which of course they consume for food. Other demons (backed by investors) devise new schemes to tempt humans into mortal sin. Failure means the souls go to Heaven, not Hell.

If the demons bringing in souls should somehow create a bubble with a grand new scheme that's guaranteed to bring many souls, but then fail, the soul futures market would crash with catastrophic results.

You could make a hilarious book satirizing the mortgage crisis or the dot-com bubble this way. (Something like Good Omens, but financial.)

I have all sorts of notes on how this could work, but no idea how to write a novel with them.

a story about some jackass that stole my laptop from my apartment. when I track the laptop down he had upgraded the memory, larger hdd and upgraded from windows to linux. he also left a bunch of pics of him and my girlfriend having "fun". So i lost my girlfriend, but I got a kick ass laptop.

A bunch of HN hackers collaborate in solving a heinous murder. Rather than writing it in "novel" form, just post it directly on HN in many parts. You could leave clues lying around in certain articles of your own, or even include real articles and incorporate it into the story.

Since it involves programmers, you might want to consider including some deliberate loopholes, or even make it highly obfuscated.

A book about a security analyst/encryption specialist who finds messages deep inside natural sequences of numbers (like pi's decimals).

Hidden Bible verses and what they mean. Why King David was a sadistic mass murderer, the real story behind Paul and the "Super Apostles", why Jesus was likely learned in Buddhism and what His name I AM THAT I AM means... all supported by scripture.

For those interested in the surprising answers (and many more): if I hit 25 points by 9pm EST, I'll write the book.

Tragedy hits a genius scientist when his family of(wife and two kids) is attacked by a gang of young men with high up political connections. His wife is killed on spot. His children later kidnapped and murdered from a location supposedly protected by the police. The entrenched corruption in the government has removed all hopes of justice. A life long pacifist, he won't succumb to violence still so he takes to the ultimate protest sit down of all time. Unknown to all the scientist had invented a super strong indestructible alloy. He creates a faceless armor out of the alloy and a very long chain. In the middle of the night He sneaks into the national monument campus with the help of his other scientist friends and drills down the chain miles into earth. And binds himself to the armor and the chain. The armor can keep him alive indefinitely but it can't be destroyed. The genius scientist is irremovable from his protest and the whole world is watching. GO!

P.S: I have been thinking about this one for a while, but don't have the courage to write it down right now.

I've always been fascinated by (or scared of) the concepts of those moments before you die. What must it feel like being led up to the electric chair, or held at gunpoint? What would your thoughts be, knowing you'd soon stop existing (or go wherever you believe dead people go)?

I imagine a city where every day one person is selected at random who will die in 24 hours and is told so. (I got this particular idea from another story, but lots of story ideas are fundamentally the same.)

A close account of how the world/nations/family/people would look only 50 years from now? - post oil, post-anything that's supposed to die and with whatever that's supposed to be adopted.

It is 120K years AD. Humanity has suffered 53 nuclear holocausts (this was made possible by advanced recovery methods researched over time). Peace for 18000 years is being upheld by an artificial intelligence which governs a flying city, eradicating advanced human settlements which threaten to develop into nuclear threats. A group of cavern dwelling humans aim to destroy this flying city by detonating a hydrogen bomb at the right place at the right time.

I've always been drawn to a world in which neural implants are so widespread that they begin to attract malware developers. Seems to me that when humanity's age old enemy (the virus) crosses the human/machine divide, some interesting (and not entirely pleasant) things will happen.

* edited for more inclusive language.

Fahrenheit 451 /pun

A group of scientists find undeniable proof that multiple deities exist in the universe, a story of what becomes of all the worlds religions as a result. I find it interesting to think how the worlds religions would react to such a discovery . Would they throw away their previous believe systems?

Another idea: a book on why animals are people, and what the future might look like when animals have a charter of rights and freedoms.

You will have a lot of fun taking one story and transposing it to a different time and place, as per 'Heart of Darkness' and 'Apocalypse Now'.

The source story does not have to be a work of fiction. You can use a true story, the benefit of this being that there are no plot holes. Scandals are a good place to start, particularly if the true story involving real, living people is too libel-likely to be given an 'honest' treatment. Scandals mired in waves of disinformation are pretty good too.

By taking the story out of the true context and setting it in another time and place you can possibly do a better job of telling the truth than you would be able to do otherwise.

For instance, you could take the Iran-Contra affair and set it in colonial times, as if it happened during the Opium Wars (for example). To get started you could start with the standard 'Wikipedia' telling of events, search and replace your characters so 'President Reagan' becomes '[King Whomever]', same with dates, same with locations. This could then serve as your rough draft. You could then quickly establish if the story actually worked. Then you could tighten up the story a bit, get someone else to read it and see if they thought it 'was true'. If so then you have got to a reasonable start point. Your full research could then begin, proper history stuff, filling in gaps and embroiderising as required. It is important that you learn more and more about your target time and place, you don't want those who know better to see your work as horribly naive.

Some of your embroiderisation can be stuff that you cannot say in your 'target' story, for instance I am sure there is an Israeli angle to the Iran-Contra story that, if told truthfully, would brand you anti-semitic, worse than Hitler etc. However, set in a different time and place you could write whatever was 'true' as 'fiction'.

There are other emergent properties of taking one story and time-warping it to somewhere else. The protagonists could get dehumanized, corrupted, revealed to be ruled by superstition and so on. Within the context of the true story and the morals of our times this might not be so evident. However, after the transposition, whatever it is that makes your characters (good and bad) may be a lot clearer to see. On the Iran-Contra example, you could take today's arms-trade and how that corrupts power and put it in context of the slave-trade of yesteryear. In the 'Opium Wars' example you could probably find a fit with indentured labour in India.

In summary, take a story you like, some history you know, mash it together and there you go, novel written.

Fellow NaNoWrimo-er!

You should have started this exercise in October. Anyway, here's mine:

The current iteration of God and Satan (or whatever fictional supernatural character you choose) BOTH suddenly go AWOL and throw the entire system of heaven and hell into a quandary. Turns out they are both vacationing on Earth on some remote island, spending their days fishing and drinking beer.

Romantic twist: One is male, the other female and it turns out they have eloped and plan to spend the rest of their lives together.

Thriller twist: They get fascinated by the concept of zombies and start creating a zombie army to serve their needs. The existence of Earth is threatened.

Sci-Fi twist. Heaven and Hell are singularities at the two ends of the universe. Thanks to the disappearance of the two, the singularities are unstable and about to collapse into one unholy (pun unintended) mess.

S&S twist: God and Satan are names of Dragons who copulate and the eggs they lay create new universes. Them going AWOL is a traditional indicator of the end of one universe and the beginning of the next.

ASOIAF twist: Each religion gets to be God and Satan for a specific period of time. The current iterations (the ones that have gone AWOL) of God and Satan are killed and the blame is laid squarely on the representatives of one of the religions. Other contenders to the thrones of Heaven and Hell emerge.

Take your pick? :)

Fascinating how many religious ideas have been posted here.

REAL HUMAN: A robot masquerades as a human being to avoid decommissioning.

Plot spoiler: there are no humans left, only robots pretending to be human. Even robots need a class system.

Build it around the premise that what was originally planned as the concept for America by the Founders went 180 degrees off course…which of course it did, but all of the dumbed down bystanders couldn't notice the subtle turning of the concept against them as they (the dumbed down ones) slipped further and further into slavery by the growing monolith known as 'government" ! Leaders openly lying…bystanders believing the lies more and more until someone finally comes up with a plan to neutralize the leaders. I know it's a geeky concept for a novel, but it isn't actually fiction...

My old apartment's super old elevator used to have a tiny window in the elevator door. You could catch split-second views of the other floors as the elevator moved by. I wanted to read a story about someone who sees something through the elevator window on one of the floors--really just an image. What the main character sees, seems unimportant at the time, but they happen to remember it fairly vividly. As the day proceeds and the character keeps flashing back to that image and over time they realize that brief flash has all of the clues to solve whatever the main crisis of the book is. The character only realizes this in stages. So perhaps first, they realize that someone was knocking on the door 601, and that fact later on becomes interesting/surprising. Then maybe later on they somehow see a person on the street who was the person knocking on the door. And the story starts to come together. etc.

A time travel device is invented that only travels forward in time