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Seers

Hi,

Just looking for a little feedback on an idea of mine. I just pubbed my latest (this morning). I won't give titles. But it's a steampunk / magic / fantasy with a twist on seers - one which I may want to use again - which is sort of the point of posting this.

Anyway, I've always had an issue with seers - those that see the future that is - because their gift can make them overwhelmingly powerful. They literally can control the entire field. Just the right nudge here and a little push there and everything falls into place for them.

But in my latest I decided to nobble them (a lot). So a seer doesn't "see" the future at all. He remembers it. Literally a seer is born knowing the entire course of his / her life. I know, it sounds strange. It would be stranger to live I suspect. But this gave me a rather fascinating plot (I thought). If a seer changes the future, it changes all his future memories. It's like lobotomising yourself - at least temporarily while your old future fades and is forgotten and a new one beds in. Which makes for most seers being completely powerless. They know their entire personal future, they know where things will go wrong, but don't dare change it. The cost is too high. And they can't be trusted either. They won't tell you the future if it messes up their futures. They'll instead tell you what they saw themselves telling you in the past, and they'll lie to save their minds.

Then I asked myself, what if they knew they were going to die or suffer some other horrid fate? Do they change it? Or do they like a chicken, simply walk up and stick their head on the chopping block? It's obviously a bad choice either way. But it gets worse. Because though they will recover from doing brain surgery on themselves, they can't predict the outcome of their changes. Maybe they can fix the thing they feared happening to them, but the fix changes a hundred other things (butterfly effect). And worse, what happens if the change they make is so large that it changes the future of other seers, all of whom are now suffering too? Do they try and change things back - while their heads are spinning? And if they do do you gate a sort of war between seers?

Anyway, that was the guts of my scenario - a war between seers, all of whom are reeling as their memories / minds are being shredded, desperate to find some stability in their thoughts, even as it means harming other seers.

What do you guys think? A plot so cunning that you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel? Or a dud? And how can I make it even juicier for the next book?

Cheers, Greg.
 

elemtilas

Inkling
Anyway, I've always had an issue with seers - those that see the future that is - because their gift can make them overwhelmingly powerful. They literally can control the entire field. Just the right nudge here and a little push there and everything falls into place for them.

Not a specific criticism, but generally speaking, much will depend on what exactly is meant by "future" here. Sure, seers might see the future, but which future? Every moment that passes by is the creation of a new universe and a whole new iteration of spacetime. Just because a seer sees XYZ this morning, doesn't mean XYZ will still be in the cards by tea.

But in my latest I decided to nobble them (a lot). So a seer doesn't "see" the future at all. He remembers it. Literally a seer is born knowing the entire course of his / her life. I know, it sounds strange. It would be stranger to live I suspect.

It actually makes perfect sense to me. Precognition is thing, as is remembering the future. You've filled out the concept rather nicely, though.

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have.”
Soren Keirkegaard

But this gave me a rather fascinating plot (I thought). If a seer changes the future, it changes all his future memories. It's like lobotomising yourself - at least temporarily while your old future fades and is forgotten and a new one beds in. Which makes for most seers being completely powerless. They know their entire personal future, they know where things will go wrong, but don't dare change it. The cost is too high. And they can't be trusted either. They won't tell you the future if it messes up their futures. They'll instead tell you what they saw themselves telling you in the past, and they'll lie to save their minds.

Then I asked myself, what if they knew they were going to die or suffer some other horrid fate? Do they change it? Or do they like a chicken, simply walk up and stick their head on the chopping block? It's obviously a bad choice either way. But it gets worse. Because though they will recover from doing brain surgery on themselves, they can't predict the outcome of their changes. Maybe they can fix the thing they feared happening to them, but the fix changes a hundred other things (butterfly effect). And worse, what happens if the change they make is so large that it changes the future of other seers, all of whom are now suffering too? Do they try and change things back - while their heads are spinning? And if they do do you gate a sort of war between seers?

Lots of space in there for interesting stories!

What do you guys think? A plot so cunning that you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel? Or a dud? And how can I make it even juicier for the next book?

Just consider the story of Jesus. You're God, you know what the future holds; you know what people are going to do. You can't change it or them. What course can one steer through such a sea? ...well, I guess read the book and find out!
 

Futhark

Inkling
Interesting paradox. My thoughts turn to a particular seer that might want to throw a spanner in the works for whatever reason. They leave themselves cue cards, clues as it were, to create or avoid a certain future, but the requirement for success is to keep the other seers in the dark. So, each day he/she sets about changing the future for a reason they don’t remember, hunted by seers who are sick of scrambled brains, with only the clues they have left themselves.
 

elemtilas

Inkling
Interesting paradox. My thoughts turn to a particular seer that might want to throw a spanner in the works for whatever reason. They leave themselves cue cards, clues as it were, to create or avoid a certain future, but the requirement for success is to keep the other seers in the dark. So, each day he/she sets about changing the future for a reason they don’t remember, hunted by seers who are sick of scrambled brains, with only the clues they have left themselves.

I think one of you needs to write that story!
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
For still more fun, how about a seer who is insane? Doesn't need to be drooling and howling crazy. Sociopath will do. Megalomaniac. Any number of mental disorders, including dementia, might cause a particular seer to do all sorts of unexpected things. Would also create an interesting narrative challenge.
 

elemtilas

Inkling
For still more fun, how about a seer who is insane? Doesn't need to be drooling and howling crazy. Sociopath will do. Megalomaniac. Any number of mental disorders, including dementia, might cause a particular seer to do all sorts of unexpected things. Would also create an interesting narrative challenge.

Yep. From a certain perspective, there simply may not be any way to tell...
 
Hi Elemtilas,

Love the Soren quote, but I don't think he was talking about precognition. Not his bag really.

The point is that seers can't afford for the future to change. They are literally born into a trap - one which has caught my villains out badly. So one, Metea, foresaw a future for herself when she was young, that was essentially boring / mundane and she wanted more. So she proved herself a seer to a religious nutter, became an official seer for the faith and was then asked regularly to make predictions which kept changing her own personal future and ripping her mind apart. The other, Barnly, wanted to take the throne from his brother and then his nephew and was willing to do anything to get it. So he also took the risk. And now - at the time of the story - both of them have been battling their madness with potions that numb their future memories so that they can function.

The point of the trap is that they're caught between what they want absolutely, and the understanding that to get what they want they have to suffer - and even then if they're desperate enough to take the gamble, they still can't know what will result from the changes they make until they've made them and their memories are in pieces.

With this device I've tried to turn what should be the most powerful gift out there into a curse - a prison cell for seers where they can't afford to change anything in their lives.

Cheers, Greg.
 
Hi Futhark,

They don't need to do that. They "remember" their entire life history from start to finish. Just as you remember your past.

So to explain what happens to them when they change something, say someone hit you on the head with a hammer and you got amnesia. But not completely. Just enough that all of your past becomes somehow distant from you. And at the same time a whole new past, a fantasy, is there in your mind. And over the following weeks and months one of those pasts becomes more real and the other more distant. You would spend all that time literally not knowing who you were, but torn between possibilities. That's what happens to them, but their "pasts" include their future.

Cheers, Greg.
 
Hi Skip,

They are insane. I've got my hero's great uncle literally talking to himself - his future selves - who no one else can see. And in keeping with the understanding that he doesn't want to change things, he's told no one he is a seer. But still he ends up getting caught in the trap as other seers change his future for him with their own changes!

As for Barnly he lives with an unquenchable hunger for the throne, for which he will do anything including kill his entire family. So yeah he's a sociopath, but he's also mad.

Cheers, Greg.
 

pmmg

Myth Weaver
This sounds like a very fun idea, I hope you flesh it out, and I am hoping there is a bit of comedy to it, which is something I could never write.

This is very similar to what Odin gave up his eye for, and in discovering the future, he shared it with the rest of the Aesir, who then undertook to prevent it, which ended up getting Balder killed and starting off the event they were trying to prevent. I think also the Cyclopes had given up an eye to see the future and if they attempted to avoid or change it, it always set in motion events which gave them very gruesome deaths. Also Merlin, in some depictions, is one living life backwards. Starting as an old man and ungrowing into a child. Not sure how that effects his knowledge of the future, but it seems similar.
 
Hi pmmg,

I know about Odin - but the cyclops example I think comes from the classic film Krull. The Merlin one I'm not sure of. Benjamin Button perhaps?

Cheers, Greg.
 

Lycaon

Acolyte
Sounds like it could be interesting as a Highlander-type scenario: seers hunting eachother to ensure their own futures. "There can be only one!"
 
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