Visionary help...

[Miss Anthrope]

Hey all, I humbly request some help for a graphic novel pitch I'm working on. It's a sci-fi story which takes place in approximately 2050, and I'm currently gathering massive amounts of information about future technology, medicine, politics,relgion etc as I try to flesh out the setting. I'd very much appreciate links to relevant websites (particularly ones with visual references) and your personal theories about the future, whether they be about technology, ethics, etc, so feel free to ramble on as long as you're aware that by doing so you might be helping me to get new ideas and persepctive. If you have an idea that you would consider my use of "ripping off", please don't write about it; I'm not looking to steal anyone's ideas, I'm looking for inspiration and information I'm unaware of.

Thanks in advance everyone, and I'll be sure to put a little "easter egg" referencing happyatheist.com in the finished work. It will be at least a few months before I even start actual finished artwork, and much longer before I'm ready to submit. I will be sure to let everyone know how it goes, and if I fail to get published I'll make the work available to read, for free, on-line.

Also, here's a link to some of my unrelated work; it hasn't been updated in a while (I don't really publicize it anyway, it's really just for personal fun, though I will be doing a massive overhaul and update when I have the time) Click here

[karadan]

I'm not sure how relevant this will be to you but it may help for some insight into how future populations may think (even though the setting for these books is waaaay beyond anything which will be available in 2050). It is from my favourite sci-fi author. Iain M Banks is a genius.

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~stefan/culture.html

Richard Morgan is an author i found only recently but the four books of his i've read so far have completely blown me away. This may be a little more relevant to you as he writes about society only 100 years into our future and they are based on earth. Unfortunately i couldn't find a larger synopsis of this particular book, but if you can get a copy, it may help with wider points of futuristic story-telling and future political intregue. I thought black man was astonishing.

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/ric ... ck-man.htm

There is a website i frequent called www.renderosity.com  It is a graphic artist site featuring some incredible talent. if you create an account, look up an artist called 'JCD'. He specialises in dystopian, noir, sci-fi city-scapes and his pictures are usually accompanied with diverse background stories. You may be able to glean some inspiration from the enormous body of sci-fi art contained on that site.

Hope this helps. I have a bunch of links at home that may also interest you so i'll post them when i get back from work.

[VanReal]

I don't know what your vision of the future is but I think it would be refreshing to see something a little less doom, gloom and dreary.  I'm not suggesting the Walt Disney vision of the future but maybe something that not so dark with decayed buildings and lack of hygiene that we usually see in futuristic sci-fi.  I never really look forward to that future.  Maybe something along the lines of advanced technology that's feasbile but you can be creative with like http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/lammas-low-impact-village.php eco-villages or advance technology that still allows for some plant life.  I always feel happy that I won't be around when looking at a lot of sci-fi images of our future.

[Miss Anthrope]

Karadan - Thank you for the links, didn't get a chance yesterday to check them out to a great extent, but I did today and they're wonderful. Even the Culture thing, despite being more distant time-wise, is useful in the sense that it's creatively inspiring; looking at time holistically is very useful to me, so in planning out a relatively short-term future I think it's good for me to also think a little further beyond.

Will definitely check out the work of Iain Banks and Richard Morgan when I get the chance.


VanReal - Thanks for that link and your thoughts, you helped me to consider something I hadn't really thought of, a naturalistic perspective. I had decided that I would like to integrate some more naturalistic design in the actual architecture of buildings and design of technological devices, but I hadn't really thought to go to sites like treehugger.com to broaden my views on potential elements of the future. Of course, now I'm forced to kind of go back tot the drawing board in my imagining of the future, so to speak, but that's a good thing, because one of my personal goals with this work is to make something that might actually be a semi-accurate vision of the future.

Also, you might be happy to know that my general vision of the future (at least in my comic) won't be "doom, gloom and dreary" (although the surrounding rural areas of the story's key setting, a large city, kind of are, as they've been ravaged and abandoned due to bio-warfare). The actual city will be slightly Utopian, not counting the poorer areas, though that aesthetic quality will kind of mask the underlying Dystopian reality of everything (greed and will to power will still be active themes). That's actually why I want to go with kind of a bright, naturlaistic aesthetic sensibility, to subtly make the "darker"elements even more pronounced and kind of disturbing. But overall it won't be a "depressing" comic, I;m aiming for balanced mix of "light and darkness".


Naturally, I'm hesitant to make detailed information public, even on my own website, since this is something I'm going to do for commercial purposes, but once I start getting some significant concept art done I'll post some on a page for you all to see.

[VanReal]

You can visit treehugger.com for all of your needs:)  Sounds like an interesting project and concept.  I liked the brightness in Aeon Flux (although the movie was not great) it was kind of different from the usual futuristic setting.  Of course with 2050 you have more room to be creative rather than having to go too far in to the future.  Let us know how it turns out for you.

[Will]

Remember, the secret to a truly great science fiction are the characters. You absolutely, positively must have great characters. This is a good article on the subject:

Secrets Of Great Characters, According To 6 Science Fiction Authors

Amazing stories need great characters. And when you're writing a story set in a futuristic or fantastical world, it's more important than ever for readers to be able to relate to your characters. It's also harder than ever, because your characters' lives and experiences will be totally different than your readers'. How do you make people identify with someone who lives in the future, or on another planet? How can your main character stand out, against a bizarre and colorful backdrop? We asked six great science fiction authors for their advice.

Get to know them as individuals, rather than types. If your characters are cut off from all the present-day cultural references, like "lawyer who went to Harvard," then it's even more important to think of them as individuals, says Elizabeth Bear, Campbell- and Hugo-winning author of Carnival and Undertow. "Try very hard to know them as people," she urges. "That goes for any setting, past or present or future â€" or alternate reality."

In particular, you should think, "'This is a person who happens to have the following traits, and all that they imply,' rather than 'this is a nuclear physicist who grew up in Iowa.'"

Try making your characters scientists. Or at least, have them be obsessed with stuff that's relevant to your storyline, advises Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of the Mars trilogy and the Science In The Capital series. Having scientists as your characters lets you "explore the setting and the character at once." And it helps if your characters obsess about the mysteries and explanations in your story. They can also be obsessed with a planet, spaceship, new procedure or alien.

Base them on people you know. The most realistic characters are often based closely on your friends or people you've met, says Rudy Rucker, Philip K. Dick-winning author of the -Ware novels and Postsingular. That goes double for your aliens, A.I.s and robots, he adds. It's always better to copy your friends than to lift from "received ideas about how SF characters might behave. Who wants to see yet another a humorless talking head with a BBC accent? The absolute worst thing in Matrix III was when Keanu gets to the virtual office of the Big Computer Mind, and he meets, like, a tweedy professor with a white beard. Ugh! At the very least it should have been a fat hacker in a T-shirt, preferably high on pineal extract." Also: to make your characters stand out, try having them say quirky, unexpected things. "Forget your Star Trek memories, and remember your wild and crazy friends â€" the ones who say things that Make No Sense," Rucker advises.

Give them a thought-out world. The more carefully thought out the world you're placing your characters into, the more we'll be able to believe that they live there, says Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose. And that also makes it easier to "contrast them against this imaginary place."

Figure out what they love, and what they fear. Try to find what drives your characters, including what they want and need, Bear urges. And understand what traumatizes them. "I tell people I like to know what they'd want on their tombstone: that seems to give me a really good handle on who they are."

She adds:

    Characters we can relate to have fears and damage, but moreover, for me they have to be devoted to something â€" an ideal, a person, whatever. Even villains become much more sympathetic when we're introduced to whatever it is that they love.

Kage Baker, author of the Company novels, agrees: "It isn't the way a person relates to his hovercar that makes him memorable; it's what's going on in his heart." No matter what planet or time you're living in, there will be "certain constants in human existence: struggle against poverty, rebellion against authority, love and desire, loneliness, curiosity. Any reader can relate to those." Make sure your character has loves and hatreds that readers can see themselves in, and the rest will take care of itself.

Don't aim for larger-than-life â€" and overshoot. One pitfall with science fiction characters is that authors sometimes make their characters "bigger than life, or archetypal" to let them compete with the big, brash colorful worlds they live in. A common mistake is veering past archetypal, all the way into "over the top, or maybe somewhat cliche." If you do try for archetypal characters, think of the classics from all genres, like Sherlock Holmes' quirky genius or Captain Ahab's drive.

Don't obsess too much about setting and toys. If you spend pages and pages on dense descriptions of your settings and how exactly your hovercar works, you're distracting the reader from your characters, says Baker.

    It's enough to say "He climbed into his hovercar" and your reader will get the idea. You don't need to give a geography lesson: "They were sitting in the courtyard drinking fire-palm wine" or "She trudged back from the well, balancing her water jar" or "They looked out across the desert and saw the yellow mountains of Califia before them" all give brief, intense impressions of a place, without stopping the narrative in its tracks or drawing focus from the main character.

Find out who's hurting. If your story involves a new situation or technological breakthrough, figure out who suffers as a result â€" maybe that should be your main character, says Robinson, quoting from Damon Knight (who was quoting James Blish in turn.)

Keep your characters grounded. The stranger the setting, the more ordinary your characters should be, says Terry Bisson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of Bears Discover Fire. "For example, in my most recent story, the narrator 'had a job and an apartment, but that was all.' The story wasn't about the setting but about the character."

Your characters should be "totally convinced they live in the present, rather than the future. Because, of course, it IS the present to them," says David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens. Make sure your world, and your characters, both have a believable past, that anchors their present. "As Gibson said, the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed. Same is true for the past: it's always with us, but sometimes beneath the surface. How one handles that is the key to character."

http://io9.com/5065556/secrets-of-great ... on-authors

[curiosityandthecat]

Hmm... the future...

H.R. Giger
Neuromancer (The Sprawl is what I'm thinking about -- amazing setting)
Snow Crash
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
Bladerunner(or anything by Philip K. Dick)
Just cyberpunk, in general.
Dirty future or clean future? Like... we thinking Fallout 3 kinda future?
Akira?
Mmm.. yes, Aeon Flux (the cartoon, obviously)
Check out Blood Electric by Kenji Siratori.
Also Haruki Murakami's Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (the Hardboiled Wonderland parts, in particular)
Maybe even Robot Carnival.
Isn't Vampire Hunter D set in the future?
Oh, oh! Futureland by Walter Mosley! "Angel's Island".
Ever seen Naked Lunch? Watch that. Interesting if you're going the route of bio-engineering. (Or psychotropic drugs, depending on how you interpret the plot, haha.)

I'll post more if I think of any. This is just a short list of ... references.

[Miss Anthrope]

Willravel, thank you for that excellent article and link. It was a great reminder to me since I've been putting so much focus in the last few weeks on setting (though of course I kind of have to since it's a graphic novel), and my thoughts have been distracted from the most important things, the characters. And I really need to maintain focus on them, since there are quite a few and in a sense they're all main characters. I'm so in over my head  

This was great, and I couldn't agree more: "The absolute worst thing in Matrix III was when Keanu gets to the virtual office of the Big Computer Mind, and he meets, like, a tweedy professor with a white beard. Ugh! At the very least it should have been a fat hacker in a T-shirt, preferably high on pineal extract."That was so cliche, and epitomized the problems with the sequels. To be honest, I don't think the Matrix should have had sequels anyway. The way the first one ended was like an alternate take on the origin of a superhero, and then with the sequels it turned into this preachy saga that nullified the mysterious quality of the first film.



VanReal, I'll definitely keep everyone updated with my progress and publication status, though if that part becomes a reality, it's going to be quite a while.
I'd say it will take at least 8 months to finish the graphic novel once I start the actual artwork, and that won't be for at least another two months.