Nothing New Under the Sun

Original Post: 18 November 2013
Posted Here: 29 November 2017

As writers, someone occasionally points out to us that there is nothing new under the sun: Whatever idea we base our stories on has probably been used by some previous writer. Whether we know it or not, we are recycling someone else's concept. For instance, as I pointed out in my 6 July 2012 post (Writing Science Fiction: Tweety Birds,) the tweety birds of my 1998 short story, "The Life of RyaLee," and the jaberjays of the "The Hunger Games" novels and movie are based on the same idea. I guess that idea is the old saying, "A little bird told me."

Back in January, 2002, I wrote an aborted chapter, "The Black Box," for my novel "Silver Threads." Tom was jumping his starship, the Marco Pollo, through subspace so that he could repeatedly listen "live" to one of his favorite songs, "26 Miles," broadcast over the radio on Earth back in the 1950s. All he had to do was to move the Marco Pollo just beyond the distance that the radio wave front would have traveled since the broadcast.

I've admitted before that I'm a bit behind in my reading. My shelf of magazines and books to enjoy has about a foot and a half of literature still waiting. But it's getting shorter. This past week I've been using my new Epson Perfection V600 scanner to continue converting my 35 mm slide collection to JPG files. The scanner, using its Digital ICE function to suppress dust and scratches, takes around 10 minutes to do a set of four slides.

I can read while the Epson scans. I've worked my way to the June 2013 issue of Analog Science Fact and Fiction. The story in that issue which prompted this post was "Wavefronts of History and Memory," by David D. Levine. The main character is a radioarcheologist. She positions her ship at a distance from Earth where she hopes to detect and process electromagnetic messages from the ancient days of the twentieth century. I'm not sure that she got as much pleasure from her efforts as Tom did.

These stories again show that there is nothing new under the sun. This does not mean that we have to dig harder to come up with ideas that no one else ever has. It simply means that, based on what might be a finite number of motifs, we can still have an infinite number of interesting tales.

Keep reading/keep writing - Jack