Brain Storming

[maxonennis]

I need to bounce ideas off of someone.

I’m world building *shudder* for a new book. I like the idea of “the rule of conservation of life” as the foundation for the magic. What would happen is, when a person of a certain race dies, their life—not soul, essence, personality, or anything like that, just their life—is transferred into an inanimate object. (It is a certain type of inanimate object, and the object itself becomes one of the beings, not like a Gollum or something.) I’ve been trying to brain storm some ideas of conflict, and without telling you the rest of the rules, I would like to know if any come to mind.

The number one conflict I can see is, because all of the sentient life is “recycled”, then there wouldn’t be sexes (bodily waste would be disposed of by other means that I’ve already planned out, and they can't procreate by sex—don't have the equipment). So that would mean that a couple wouldn’t be able to live in a sexual relationship—unlike the rest of nature around them which uses sex to procreate. I thought it would be interesting to play with a story about two of these beings in love and see what would happen. (Note: there are multiple species, and none of them are human.)

If you’ve got any ideas, let me know.

[jwdenzel]

Do they retain memories from life to life?

[maxonennis]

Do they retain memories from life to life?

I didn't explain it right. It's like the law of conservation of energy. No energy is lost, but transferred. It's the same theory here. No one is coming back to life again and again, but rather when they die, someone else comes to life.

[jwdenzel]

I see.  This idea was explored pretty well in Weis and Hickman's DEATHGATE CYCLE.  (Book 3, "FIRE SEA" in particular).  The concept there was that when a person died, there were mages who would re-animate the corpses to become mindless undead.  This was a common thing in society: when grandpa passed away, the family would resurrect him to help out around the house.    The flip side was that for every corpse that was resurrected, a living being somewhere else died at random.   Over time, the society spiraled downward toward its own destruction.

Your idea is a little different:  this is an automatic process that happens in nature.  And you want to explore the idea of two of these beings falling in love.  Ask yourself: can other beings of this race fall in love?  If not, what other emotions are they incapable of expressing?  One might argue that if you cannot love, then you cannot hate. Or be jealous. Or have desire of any kind.  If those are true, then would here be war?   Maybe this race is "perfect" and has none of these issues.  Until one day, two of their kind "evolve" somehow to be able to express love.  That leads to desire, jealousy, hate, arguments, war, etc etc....

Another thing to research and see if it inspires you is that several real-life Eastern religions teach about this sort of reincarnation.  The goal is to "break out" of the cycle by attaining Enlightenment.

Also, check out Azimov's robot books as they deal a lot with robots who go from having no capacity to show emotion, to being much more realized and capable of things like love.   That movie "A.I" is a good example.

Hope that gives you some ideas!

[maxonennis]

Thanks!

Yes, all of the sentient races can feel emotions the same as humans (maybe not quite as strong due to the lack of certain organs that produce hormones, but close enough). Which reminds me, does anyone know enough about biology to tell me what kind of pseudo-biology would, in theory, be required for the species to produce roughly same amount hormones as humans, if the species were without genitalia?

Also, I wanted to explore the "intimate" relationships of said races rather than the idea of reliving, recycling life. So anyone who wants to chime in with any insight or theories there, please do!

[maxonennis]

Something just hit me, if the defining difference between the sentient races and the none sentient was sex, then sex would be considered evil to an extent. So, religiously they would hold in revere inanimate objects (the specific type) because they are the starting point of all sentient life, and despise sex because it is the difference between them and the rest of the organic world.

[Necroben]

If they only feel mild emotion (Affection vs Love), but have a distante memory; maybe one who yearned for what was lost "found" a way to control the transfer to a creature that could.  In so doing was then able to do it for a few select others.  Those who stayed the same created a way to controle other creatures.  They would then use those they took possesion of to "return" things back to the natural order.  Or something like that.

[maxonennis]

I wouldn't call their emotions mild, but somewhat less than our own—I’m also not entirely finished world building, so I might just make their emotions human equivalent.

Also, memories don't pass on. Think of the lives as airline tickets. They over book every flight (because some people won’t show, but that’s another story), and if one person backs out, another gets in. They are entirely different people with no connection aside from one showed up and the other didn’t.

I'm beginning to think this idea would be best as a novella rather than a full novel. I can create enough plot and flowing conflict for a novella. I don’t want an epic (I don’t know if I can make relatablity--is that a word?-- of the characters maintain in a 100,000+ word novel without one human character), and I think it would distract for what I want to be the theme: love.

A 20,000 word novella sound about right for the story.