All Possible Worlds

I always think of concepts like jars of coloured liquid. Every concept has in it a certain amount of story potential liquid. It might be the case that you have an elegantly crafted story based around a few simple premises which, for all their simplicity, afford you reams of material. Indeed, the really simple ideas are sometimes the richest. But excavating every last corner of the material might undermine the elegance and purity of concept of the story. So you revisit the concept in a later story. Here, then, is a perfectly good idea for writers to bring back good ideas. There's no rehashing, no laziness. Here is a reason predicated on getting as much interesting material into the audience's eye as possible.

Here's one of those ideas, that's really simple, but is a vast ten gallon tank of plot juice: The Holodeck. You know, from Star Trek. Concept: A room in which you can create alternate worlds in full detail. That's simple to explain, immediately grasped. And it is FULL of story concepts. You couldn't hope to cover everything it offers in a single story. There's a richness of ideas there that can only be dug into by many stories, from many angles, in many genres.

So it can't just be left to Star Trek. Here's the issue. It's a common one, I've seen it plenty of times, but here's the specific encounter that has me thinking about it right now. I just listened to the Doctor Who story 'Auld Mortality' (Review here), in which the Doctor is an author using the 'Possibility Generator' to create historical worlds for him to explore, in order to better devise his novels. It's a cracking good story, and most of the reviews have yielded to that view. And yet even the ones that are full of praise for it snark at the 'Possibility Generator' and make silly comments regarding the similarity to the Holodeck. As if it's just a stolen idea parcelled under another name.

What a stupid attitude. Auld Mortality mines a bit of the Holodeck concept plot material that hasn't - and couldn't be - explored in Trek. So such comments are ridiculous. People need to be less precious about ideas, less quick to cry rehash or plagiarism, and start engaging their critical faculties. Because maybe, far from being plagiarism or a rehash, the writer has used this concept because he's seen in it the potential to spin a yarn that's genuinely new. Maintaining that attitude only serves to inhibit the exploration of innovative ideas.