A society that is organised from the throne of the Emperor outwards, the most distant reaches of the Empire being the lowest in rank. It is tradition that when seated at dinner, everyone sits in social rank, the most important person being seated closest to the throne, even if just by a few feet in a distance of hundreds of miles, from the furthest outpost to the grandest rooms in the Imperial Palace. The story of one young social climber told through the meals he eats at these dinners, working his way inwards, all the way to his last one, sat on guard duty at a gate house where he has been banished, as far from the throne as a man can get.
Diameter Disposition
Idea for a spy thriller
Two spies with diametrically opposite political beliefs are locked in a battle of wits in the capital of a neutral country. Gradually their battle warps each other's tactics and beliefs until they entirely swap loyalties, each defecting to the other side, maintaining their opposition to each other.
Fling Promise
On holiday on a small island a woman from the big city promises the young man she's having a fling with that she'll return to see him. She does not, so he heads to the city to find her. She, of course, does not want him there and he is completely out of his depth, but gradually he begins to find his feet, while she is reminded of her holiday self. In the end he remains in the city while she returns to the island and a simpler life.
Architecture Good
An architect devises a style of building in which it is impossible to be bad. Something about the architecture puts the brain into a state of happy fellow feeling, encouraging moral behaviour. This style of architecture is immediately adopted for all public buildings. Gradually public life becomes increasing safe but also increasingly bland and featureless. A group of activists discover that just introducing unexpected elements – statues, trees, playground equipment – can jam this effect. The very success of their campaign, the fact that they're able to carry out these interventions within the 'good' buildings means that what they're doing is also somehow 'good'. It is good not to be wholly good all the time.
Demonstrator Inspiration
An agent is investigating what appears to be an actual superhero: a masked individual engaging in acts of activism: attacking rapacious companies, unjust authorities, domestic terrorists. They slowly realise that the superhero is networked. Just a costume and a character that anyone can adopt, a shared identity, used by whoever's skills or tactics are useful for the next action. A hero whose secret identity is anyone. Or everyone. They are, like all good superheroes, always changing and never ending.
Flash Justice
In an effort to clear a courts backlog, minor infractions are handed over to AI to adjudicate. However, because it has been trained on public domain material, the AI keeps handing out antiquated judgements like 'transportation to the colonies'. Of course, Australia doesn't want them, so sentenced individuals are forced to behave as if they were in Australia: only go about at night, observe a mirror calendar, be treated by everyone else as if they were thousands of miles away. To be 'Down Under' is to be a sort of living ghost.
Variety Wealth
A troupe of entertainers who are always on hand for the entertainment of a vastly wealthy family. They are constantly performing in a purpose built theatre space just in case someone wanders in and wants entertainment. All too often, however, they are performing to no one but themselves. Some acts have become little more than rituals while others are becoming increasingly avant garde as performers try to keep themselves, and an audience that has seen them a thousand times, interested.
Gradually a whole new art movement is born.
Permanent Thaw
In a future where all the icecaps have thawed and there is no more natural ice or snow, an old man remembers the last snowball he made, which he put in his parent's freezer as a keepsake. Amazingly he inherited the freezer and finds the snowball. He takes it out and marvels at it and then, as should always be done with snowballs, throws it at his great-grandson.
A short story in the Ray Bradbury style
Alternatively: a term for binge watching Inspector Morse
Slogan Heir
A man working at a huge company best known for its slogan can’t figure out what it is the company actually does.
He eventually discovers that the CEO inherited the company but it had been so destroyed by the generations that all that was left was the name and the slogan,
The heir turned the slogan into a business, commissioning popular ads, getting it into comedy skits, making it a household terms. All the company does now is market the slogan.
The heir eventually sells the company for a huge amount of profit, leaving the purchaser to wonder what exactly they have bought.
Satirical TV series
Cooperative Hiccup
In an oppressive one party state, a mechanic with hiccups makes a mistake fixing a government vehicle which means the secret police fail to carry out a raid on dissidents. The mechanic becomes an accidental hero and the resistance movement adopts a new strategy of annoying tiny mistakes, using the secret sign of hiccupping as a password. The movement spreads and the country starts to become ungovernable. The secret police finally catch up with the mechanic and imprison him. This causes a general uprising and the government is toppled. The mechanic, who has not realised what is going on, finds himself made the new president. He still has hiccups.
A movie, I think
Suite Shape
A hotel has a suite of a peculiar shape that has in fact been designed in order to warp space, to create a room for an inter-dimensional traveller. A junior member of hotel staff, delivering room service, finds themselves wandering between hotels in parallel realities, in the company of this multiversal tourist, trying to get back to their own reality.
(I just reinvented Doctor Who, didn’t I?)
Maybe a comic book series?
or
A game in which you play and interior designer having to organise furniture in odd shaped rooms to meet increasingly bizarre demands from clients
Tactic Function
A battle damaged military robot gets separated from its squad and finds itself on a remote farm. It mistakes a shepherd boy for its commander and following its programming starts obeying his orders, applying its tactical ability to farm chores. Gradually it begins to question the use of tactics without strategy and what, if anything , the goals of its tactics ever were. But when the war returns to this remote valley, it must decide between its new found pacifism and using its old skills to defend its new friends.
This is an animated film, isn’t it?
Chimney Approach
Chimneys act as dimension al gateways - that’s how Father Christmas fits down them.
Go up them and you reach a snowy roofscape, where the gables are like mountain ranges and it is always Christmas.
Not a warm and fluffy contemporary Christmas, but an ancient, wild Christmas, full of fires and feasty and ferocious jollity. A Christmas that is just as full of strange frightening things: Perchta, the Kallikanzaros, Mari Lwyd, Krampus.
This is one for the Christmas Stories! (And I already know how I’m going to use it)
Formation Indication
A geologist believes that a peculiar rock formation is proof of the Silurian hypothesis: the remains of an incredibly ancient civilisation that pre-dates the evolution of humans. They put together a team that comes to the conclusion that the formation is a calendar on a geologic scale over millions of years, which is warning of something that is set to recur soon. But it is not a warning, it is a promise: the ancient builders are 'returning'.
alternatively
A palaeontologist gets put into a dream state and projects himself back into the body of a Tyrannosaur, in which shape he kills a bunch of dinosaurs and arranges their bodies to be fossilised in a particular way in order to spell out an insult to his rival.
A short story in a Twilight Zone mode
Denial Champion
An athlete at an international competition wins his event, but during the event there has been an invasion and his country no longer exists. He founds the State of Denial and is awarded the medal in the name of his new, fictional country. More people flock to join his new 'country', all people who have been denied success in something and won't let it go. Now their unconventional skills are going to be needed to make this new country work.
A movie or TV show, I think
Pan Defend
The princess is a picky eater.
In an effort to find something that she will eat, the Emperor has invited famous chefs from around the world to his court, sent wise men to dig out ancient cookery books, sent spies to steal recipes from foreign courts.
One young apprentice chef, the most junior in the palace kitchens, has a different idea. Armed only with his skills with a paring knife and defended only with makeshift armour made from pots and pans, he sets out into the wild beyond the Empire’s borders to discover new recipes for himself.
Accompanied only by an retired monk who he was treating to snacks from the kitchen, he frequently runs into trouble and monsters, but always finds a way out through cooking and eating together, finding a common ground in food.
The monk starts writing accounts of the cook’s adventures and sending them home to the palace, where he quickly becomes famous, unwittingly winning the heart of the princess.
(I think the retired monk might be the old Emperor, forced into retirement by his power hungry son)
Maybe a comic book series?