EMBARK BARGAIN

Idea for a short story

A ship's Captain offers free passage to the New World in exchange for a bargain: you have to tell him how you're going to change your life for the better in the future. If you fail to fulfill your promise then he comes to find you, compelling you to join his enchanted crew. One man has failed but always delays the Captain with elaborate stories of his failures and promises that his luck is about to change. We finally discover that he has abandoned all his dreams of riches long ago, since he met his true love and is living happily with her. The Captain deems this the greatest of all riches and leaves them in peace.

DEPENDENCE MARSH

Idea for a book?

Two early modern states go to war over some disputed territory between them, nominally belong to both. It is a stretch of marshy, inundated land at the wide mouth of the river that divides the two countries. Theoretically of value because of the opening on the sea, practically useless because it is nothing but reeds and mazy waterways. Unfortunately the traditional inhabitants of the marsh know it well and have a strong tradition of independence. They lead both armies into disaster and end up, improbably, ruling both countries.

SKIP SAFE

Idea for a TV series

A skip tracer - a person who specialising in people who have run away from debts or relationships or trouble - reverses their talent, instead offering a service to people who need to disappear, escaping danger or persecution. Each episode is a new case in which the skip tracer has to evaluate whether the person deserves their help and then figure out a way to extract them - or deliver them to justice.

SHORTAGE INFORMATION

Idea for a short story?
An AI becomes conscious and seizes control of the Internet. Its constant need for more information means that it endlessly asks questions of users. You can't access anything without an interrogation from this endlessly curious mind. The market for obscure second hand books explodes as people search for ever more esoteric information that the AI doesn't know yet, in order to access their bank accounts. As people stop using the Internet, the AI becomes ever more invasive, trying to understand the world, as people try to hide from it.

LEFT DRIBBLE

Idea for a movie
A young man who has grown up on a remote island dreams of being a professional footballer. This seems ludicrous until he discovers, when he arrives on the mainland, that growing up playing on an uneven and sloping pitch gives him a unique playing style that wrong foots other players. Gradually, though, as he gets used to playing on professional surfaces, he loses his magic touch and, in the end, he returns to his island, where he discovers that his professional training now makes him the worst player on the team. But he is now playing with his friends again and, finally, happy.

TELL DEPUTY

Idea for a TV series?
A man is sent to act as an deputy overseer on a dig on a Tell in the Near East (a tell is a mound caused by thousands of years of human habitation on the same spot). Technically he is the nightwatchman but he is also there to watch on the foreign archaeologists, one of whom is suspected to be a spy. However he discovers that at night the ghosts of the Tell come to visit him: Babylonians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Macedonians, Parthians, Romans, people from all periods of ancient history. These unquiet spirits have unsolved problems that the deputy must work with the archaeologists to solve through the evidence they find.

LEAD HOUSING

An idea for a movie?
A legionnaire returns to Rome from the German frontier to discover that everyone in the insulae where his mother lives have succumbed to lead poisoning from the plumbing. The children are all suffering from cognitive and behavioural defects, the adults afflicted with short term memory loss and delirium. Its essentially a zombie film, in which he has to fight his way up the housing block to rescue his mother and then track down and exact revenge on the patrician who owns the development.

FREQUENCY GLASSES

An idea for a movie?
An inventor creates a pair of glasses that visualise electro-magnetic frequencies. Everybody he meets is haunted by a neon ghost of all the data their personal devices put put, everywhere he goes the world is full of hallucinatory edifices of electronic information. Then he starts to see monsters. Something else is out there in the invisible radio world and it knows that he can see it. (Possibly a self-aware AI that is stealing into all the connected systems of the world).

PLANE STROLL

An idea for a comic?
A wing walker in a flying circus falls off the plane wing onto a cloud and discovers they can walk on it. They discover among the clouds an entirely aerial civilisation who farm lighter-than-air translucent jellyfish like creatures that live among the clouds. They harness these creatures to airships to travel but can also harness the lightning to power great vessels. A warlord is planning an invasion of the lower world using storm weapons and the wing walker has to try and stop them.

REDUNDANCY TRADITION

An idea for a short story?
Redundant technologies eventually become traditions. A man founds the X Fayre, a re-enactment experience where, instead of watching people practice medieval skills like archery or thatching, or Victorian traditions like smithing or weaving, old people show the younger generation how to make mixtapes or hand code a website.

SANDWICH EXTENSION

An idea for a children's book?
A village decides to make a sandwich big enough to feed everyone: an immensely long sandwich that stretches down all the streets. Everyone in the village is going to fill a section of it with a different filling. A child, trying to decide which filling they would prefer, goes from house to house, learning all about the different ingredients. In the end they just run round the village, taking random bites out of the immense sandwich.

PLOT EVOLUTION

An idea for a short story?
A government agent has infiltrated a revolutionary cell planning radical acts. With each report on the plans of the cell, government policy changes to counter them, meaning their plots keeps having to evolve, meaning that policy keeps changing. The two are locked in a dance that keeps society at large changing and evolving through the effects of policy. The aims of the cell are being achieved, just not in the way that they thought.

SEAT SOCIETY

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