Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

What to write about?  I’m not doing fiction on the blog much lately, after having recently learned how to write short-story length short stories.  And I’ve stopped writing about the big bad eating disorder on the theory that if things are going well (they are!!!) it’s best not to do anything that might upset the balance.  So I figured I might write a little about the new story I’ve started and the ideas I have for it.

For those that don’t know science fiction, one of the big names in sci fi is Isaac Asimov.  Asimov was a favorite of mine in my early teens, and I even had a subscription to “Asimov’s Science Fiction” which was a magaazine of short sci-fi stories.

One of Asimov’s most successful series was the Foundation Novels.  The first few were sets of shorter stories, and later on some of them were ordinary novels.  The Foundation books began with the idea that the Galactic Empire was on the verge of collapse, and one man figured this out ahead of time and set a plan in place to limit the damage after the collapse occured.  This man was Hari Seldon, and he worked out a mathematics of Psychohistory which was what allowed him to predict and shape the future.

My new story began with a character, the tempermental genius.  I thought about writing a story about a genius who is revered by the general population but is very difficult for those closest to him.  It’s not a new idea of course, the tempermental genius is an archetypal character.

The direction I decided to go on was to make this genius character a revised version of Hari Seldon, and have him discover Psychohistory in the present, at MIT, in Boston.  I decided to look at him mostly through the eyes of a woman who both studies under him and becomes romantically attached to him.

I like the idea of re-imagining a classic character and maybe putting a bit of a feminist take on him.  All my heroes, I’ve recently realized, are male writers.  Many of them write in ways that totally by accident end up either not including women or devaluing them.  I also like the idea of bringing Psychohistory back because these days we have so many doomsayers, so many people predicting our imminent collapse and destruction.  Is it all hysteria, and can we as non-scientists even know what’s really to be feared and what’s just, you know, Swine Flu aka the Porky Sniffles?