@n o s t r a d a m u s location_city
I have been big into fantasy writing for a while but I decided to give sci-fi a go while I wait for agents to get back to me about rep for my completed work (see my absolutely ginormous writing log).
Just wanted to test the waters for a new idea and make sure it's not just my mind doing some bizarre ramblings. Any feedback is appreciated.
Idea:
Have been thinking a lot about palliative care, climate/eco-nihilism, weird longevity movements (a la Bryan Johnson), accelerationism and alien invasions. All really positive things to think about all the time, I know.
And the idea came to me about someone grieving their parent's death from a long-running cancer in the wake of an alien invasion. It would be set in a near-future scenario where climate change has wrecked havoc on the earth (the MC's parent would have died from cancer caused by man-made pollution, likely microplastics) and aliens arrive as a sort of planetary palliative care team to guide the Earth through the last of it's days. I want to explore ideas of death denialism (like how weird rich guys dream of living forever using wacky medical technology and trying to start space colonies), grieving self-identity (ie. what does someone who has been a long time caretaker do once the person they were taking care of dies?), the idea of humans as a form of cancer on the Earth (which is not a thing I believe but I remember a lot of the discourse generated when the show Sweet Tooth aired a few years back and found it really interesting), and what it means to hold someone's hand while they die.
I don't have a concrete plot, just a vague idea. But I wanted to know if it was the sort of thing anyone else wanted to read about or if it was an idea very specific to my set of interests. I do have an ending and it would be some sort of Earth 2.0/habitat being set up for all of those who though they were least likely to be selected for such a thing (including our MC). Kind of like a model museum exhibit that these aliens like to collect for each world they nurse into the grave (in the same way people hold onto loved-ones belongings after they die)
Snippet:
To hold someone’s hand as they die is either an act of mercy or an act of repentance. But it is an act all the same. Nobody ever prepares you on the protocol, what you are supposed to say or do. There is some fuzzy vignette, of movies, of everyone tearfully gathered around a hospital bed as someone whispers their way to silence.
But what happens if it takes longer than you anticipated? What if you run out of platitudes and promises of the other side, what then? Do you stare or sing or tell stories? What if it were hours, or days, or years, or decades. What would you do then? Today my father died, and the Earth did too.
It was a slow death, though it wasn’t supposed to be. Stage 4, rare, incurable. You would think such a thing would take someone quickly, that was what dad had thought. But it had been 10 long years instead. No matter how many promises of new treatments and emerging technologies and experimental therapies had been flung in his direction, none ever seemed to materialise. He would turn a positive corner only to plunge back down to the sickest he’d ever been over and over and over. And I held his hand many times.
And this time, the last time, I realised that I had run out of things to say. I had used up all of my platitudes and promises on all of the past times I had thought were going to be the last time. I stared at him and he stared at me and I held his hand until it was over. It’s a bad thing to admit that I let go as soon as I knew he was gone. That I waited 10 minutes in silence afterwards, shifting from foot to foot awkwardly on the other side of the hospital room, before I went to go fetch a nurse. Just so they wouldn’t think I was heartless. So they would think that I had let out some mournful wail as he slipped away and held a deathbed-side vigil for the memory of my beloved father.
But I had done no such thing. 10 years is a long time to prepare a fitting obituary and a long time for a person to not be the same as they used to be. My good memories were very far behind me.
Once the appropriate amount of time had crawled by, I stuck my head out of the hospital room to see if the little brunette palliative care nurse who had stepped out a while ago to “Give you two a private family moment,” was hovering outside the door like I had suspected she might be. But there was no sign of her. To my surprise the hall beyond was dead silent, by hospital standards at least.
Cautiously, I padded up the hall towards the ward desk. Hoping my expression and my gait would display enough sorrow that the nurse on duty would, by some form of osmosis, figure out my father had died and take care of it without me having to say a word. I would have no such luck.
Around the desk had gathered a half-moon crowd. Of doctors and nurses and patients who were well enough to be out of bed. The brunette palliative care nurse was there, glass container of overdressed salad in hand, fork hovering in mid-air and mouth agape. They were all staring upwards at the screen mounted from the ceiling, that otherwise would have been playing some muted long-cancelled soap opera with subtitles large enough that they covered half the picture. It struck me, as I neared, how much they all looked like the corpse of my father. Faces drawn and frozen, eyes wide and unblinking.
I rounded in behind some older lady leaning on her IV pole. Joining in the half moon to see what had caught all of their attention. It was news footage, though the channel escapes my memory. ‘Breaking’ flashed red in one corner and in the other was a smaller picture of an unattended podium standing by for someone to take it. The picture behind was of the sky, gloomy and smog-riddled. And of the incomprehensibly-shaped metal object that hovered in it. Underneath read the headline ‘They come in peace?’.
And in that moment, to my guilt and horror, I felt relief. Nobody would expect me to mourn my father now.