psychotick
Auror
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.
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.