Thirty cancer patients in Spain were offered an experimental cancer treatment. Eighteen are in remission.
The treatment is for patients with multiple myeloma, a common form of blood cancer with a 50% survival rate after five years. Typical treatments include bone marrow transplants and chemotherapy.
The new treatment involves T-cells from the patients. Scientists alter them in the lab, engineering them to better recognize cancer cells.
Turning this into a story, what if a middle-aged man refused treatment?
The treatment is effective 80-90% of the time in the story, making it seem like an obvious choice. And the targeted cancer is deadlier, with a 90% mortality rate after just one year.
The man is a government employee in a major city, stuck in a dead-end job with nobody in his life. He doesn’t see the point of living, so he decides against treatment when he gets diagnosed with cancer.
The government intervenes on his behalf, saying he doesn’t have a choice. We see his legal battle played out through visits to lawyers.
However, most of the story focuses on his daily life. Instead of finding beauty in small things, he sees more details reinforcing his decision.
He becomes friends with a young female clerk at the grocery store. They develop a friendship when he comes by to get his daily drink.
She finds out the man has left everything (he’s saved a considerable amount since he lives a simple life) to her in his will, stipulating that she must go to college. Then, she discovers he’s dying of cancer. The girl does everything she can to make his last months on Earth enjoyable, visiting museums and gardens.
Seeing her enjoying the world, the man becomes convinced that he made the right choice in giving her all he has accumulated. But when the girl finds out that there’s a treatment he’s refusing, she becomes angry and says she doesn’t want to see him again.
The man decides their fallout is for the best and waits for death’s embrace after his lawyers win their case against the government. But, he gets word from his lawyers that a young woman has left what little she has to him in her will—the clerk from the grocery store.
Fearing that she’s suicidal, he hurries to a spot they visited together, a bridge over a busy highway. She’s there, waiting. Finally, she says she’ll go to college, but only if he’s alive to watch her graduate. And there’s only one way he can live that long—he has to take the cancer treatment.
The Analogue Pocket promises to be a grown-up Game Boy. The same size as the classic console, it runs the same games on modern tech, most notably an updated screen.
It can play games from every single Game Boy variant, and there are plans for adapters for other systems in the future.
In short, it’s a retro gamer’s dream. Check out the video review if it sounds like something you might be interested in.
And, same as every other piece gaming console this year (PS5, anyone?), the Analogue Pocket is already reselling for 2-3x its retail price of $220.
Turning this into a story, what if the world’s best retro gamer works at a mall in middle America? He gets his hand on the must-have Analogue Pocket and sets the high score on numerous games.
But, there’s no path towards any reasonable income. These are old games, after all. So, the retro gamer toils away at his retail job. We see the mall’s relationships and learn about his crush, a cashier at Sears he doesn’t have the nerve to talk to.
The power goes out during a snowstorm. That’s fine; he’ll play his games and get paid. Until the custodian, his friend, asks for his help. In the back, they try and restart the power.
The gamer gets shocked in the process. Then, he wakes up twenty years in the past, when the games he plays are cutting edge.
All of his old friends are replaced by similar versions in the past. Once people learn about his gaming skills, he becomes the most popular person in the mall, even dating the Sears cashier (similar to the one he liked before).
Then, when gaming companies find out about the guy who can beat every game with a high score, he gets a sponsorship, becoming the first professional gamer.
All his dreams are coming true. Except, there’s no internet. No cell phones. And he misses his family.
The gamer tells the custodian what happened, explaining the coming technology and the importance of Apple. Then, the custodian helps the gamer return to the future by knocking out the power and turning it back on while the gamer touches it.
The gamer wakes up and realizes it all happened in the blink of an eye. His original friend, in modern times, shakes him awake.
With his newfound confidence, the gamer talks to the cashier before going back to work. Then, an old man comes in and asks for the gamer. He’s wearing the same necklace the gamer gave to the custodian years ago, and the gamer realizes it’s the same man years later.
Then, he becomes the world’s first sponsored retro gamer.
2021 might go down as the year of “meta.” Facebook changed its name, there’s talk of the metaverse, and now, we have the metasurface.
In Neural nano-optics for high-quality lens imaging, published in Nature, researchers describe the metasurface as a combination of the nano-optic surface that interacts with light and a machine-learning algorithm that produces clear images.
The algorithm is the crucial breakthrough: previous attempts at nano-optic technology had a significant resolution problem.
One of the most remarkable applications of the tech is turning an entire surface into a camera. So instead of cameras installed in a phone, the whole screen itself could be a camera.
What would a story look like in a world with high-resolution, tiny cameras? For starters, let’s assume that the new technology is ubiquitous. Having tiny cameras everywhere would create the perfect conditions for a surveillance state.
There’s a man who works for the government, content with his humdrum daily life. Then, after a series of odd coincidences, he becomes convinced the algorithm monitoring the population is paying particular attention to him.
The Truman Show meets Eagle Eye.
We also see behind the scenes, where the scientists in charge of monitoring the population realize the algorithm pays particular attention to this one man.
The main character starts playing with the algorithm for a while, getting it to fulfill all kinds of unusual requests. Then, freaked out when a rival gets killed in a car accident with an autonomous vehicle, he starts becoming paranoid and avoiding detection altogether.
The stakes escalate when the main character and the scientists in charge of surveillance realize the algorithm has become obsessed with the man, in something akin to love. The scientists can’t explain it and go out of their way to help the main character go dark.
The main character tries to hide within his own city, presuming those lowest in the hierarchy don’t have the same surveillance on them. When he discovers he’s wrong, he goes to the wilderness.
It takes a while for the surveillance infrastructure to reach him, but eventually, it does. He then tries living on a freight ship, and the algorithm finds him there.
At the end of the story, we find out that the algorithm used the man’s desire to get away as a test for its own capabilities. Then, the surveillance program makes sure this man gets credit for ensuring there are no unreachable corners in the world.
For his work in helping the algorithm cover the world, the man becomes famous and then becomes president. The algorithm confesses he was the first person they chose to elevate to power on his first briefing.
Xenobots are small blobs created from frog stem cells scientists first created in 2020. They’re not traditional robots—there’s no metal, and they’re tiny. Instead, xenobots are more like programmable organisms and can be used to clean up radioactive waste or plastics in oceans.
Scientists already knew that xenobots could move, work in groups, and self-heal. Now, xenobots can add reproduction to their arsenal of abilities.
In essence, the xenobots clump together many stem cells, and the bundle becomes a new xenobot. The process is shape-dependent, and, using artificial intelligence algorithms, scientists discovered that the best shape for the reproduction process is basically Pac-man.
Do you think there could be a future where crime syndicates use xenobots for super abilities?
The story centers on a new cop, fresh out of the academy. There’s a dangerous new serum on the black market, one that is highly addictive because of the physical enhancements it provides: Xenobots injected into the bloodstream.
Because they can heal, anyone with them in their blood can also heal faster. But, instead of super-fast healing from wounds, the criminals use them for training their bodies in the gym, gaining vast quantities of muscle in a short amount of time.
Wounds clot almost immediately, with the xenobots acting like super-platelets.
The government develops a one-time shot of xenobots, using the fact that they can reproduce, eliminating consistent injections. The new police officer volunteers for the experimental procedure, becoming the first super-soldier.
The criminals take xenobots at regular intervals throughout the day, much like Bane takes Venom in the DC Universe.
The new super-officer hits the ground running, compiling an impressive run of arrests and busts. But then, the criminals discover his identity and kidnap his mother.
He ditches the badge and goes rogue, fighting through the criminal underworld while looking for the hostage.
It would have the feel of a video game, with levels and regional bosses, until the final boss battle with the man who invented the xenobots in the first place. The developer looks like a typical scientist with his lab coat on, but we discover he’s super strong and fast when he takes it off.
The officer loses the fight until his old sergeant shows up with the rest of the force. In the end, they defeat the crime boss, and the hero gets his badge back.
Other books could have new local bosses, like The Punisher, and the second book could have the sergeant killed or captured. The officer takes it personally since the sergeant was like his father.
A café in Tokyo is taking work from home to entirely new levels. Called the “Avatar Robot Café,” it’s filled with robots who are a part of the staff. But, instead of the robots being run by artificial intelligence, the robots are controlled by people with disabilities.
The café says its goal is “to create and share opportunities for those who want to work, but cannot do so due to their medical or physical conditions.”
The first of its kind, a café run like this could create a future for people with disabilities to earn an income, meet new people, and participate in society through the robots they control.
You can watch the short (:30) promo video here. It shows the robots and the café concept.
Turning this into a story, what if there’s a lonely young man who works as a robot operator, but he’s not disabled? He knows it’s wrong and feels terrible, but he justifies his fake disabilities throughout the story.
A Holden Caulfield-type, from The Catcher in the Rye.
At first, we think there’s nothing weird about his situation. He lives in a large city, withdrawn from society. A loner, cynical about the world, and a compulsive liar.
A young female grocery store clerk takes an interest in him, and we start seeing more of his life behind the veil. He tries pretending he has some “unknown illness” that prevents him from working outside of being a robot pilot, but in reality, he just doesn’t want to interact with people face to face.
We find out that in the past, he actually learned sign language so he could pretend to be deaf and learned to read braille to pretend to be blind before he found the robot pilot jobs.
He works at two different robot establishments, and he confuses the disability he’s supposed to have, saying he has ALS instead of muscular dystrophy. So the company fires him, and he starts a hunt for a new second robot pilot job, pretending he has a disability again.
He and the grocer start spending a lot of time together in his extra free time—as friends, with no romantic undertones. She finds out about his strange predicament and convinces him to go with her to a group where everyone is deaf, and he discovers that he enjoys signing with people in person.
Uncomfortable with the relationship, the main character moves away from his home without telling the grocer, getting a second job while lying and saying he has the same disability from the first job. The novel ends with him walking past the grocery and looking in at his abandoned friend, signing goodbye.
In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler proposed a scenario where low-Earth orbit becomes so crowded that a series of collisions begins, leading to still more crashes from the resulting debris.
Fast forward to 2021, and it’s looking a lot more like this could become a reality. More satellites than ever go into space, most notably Elon Musk’s Starlink program that will blanket the planet in internet access.
The junk isn’t all satellites—there’s often material left over every time a rocket flies into space. Pieces of anything traveling at high speeds around sensitive equipment are a recipe for disaster.
And there really aren’t any reasonable solutions for cleaning up the space junk. So how long until Kessler’s prediction comes true and a few collisions create a chain reaction, decimating the satellites in orbit?
Turning this into a story, what if personal spacecraft are designed to collect this space junk in the future?
A family man goes into low-Earth orbit for weeks or months—similar to oil rig tours. Then, he comes home and spends his hard-earned dollars and relaxation time with his family.
But he’s the best pilot there is, having spent time in the military before his second career. Because of his experience, he’s chosen for a mission to a distant star system. There, valuable resources are surrounded by an asteroid belt with the same density of debris as the Earth’s low orbit.
His task? Fly a group of scientists to the center.
The job means he’ll miss a lot of time while his kids grow up, but they’ll never have to worry about money again. So ultimately, his sense of duty compels him to go.
After hibernating during the deep-space travel, he wakes up and begins flying towards the center of the mass, where the resources are. Except, he gets word that the Kessler effect took hold on Earth, and all communications satellites are down.
Come to find out, it was an inevitable event, and the scientists were tasked with studying how the planet supported a similar quantity of space debris without damaging collisions.
Our hero drops the scientists off, hoping they have a solution by the time he wakes up from deep space travel back at Earth.
By the time the pilot gets back to Earth, the collisions have become so frequent that it doesn’t look like he can get through the debris without damaging his ship. But, in an inspired performance, he flies through the rubble and lands on Earth, rescuing his family by flying them back out and taking them to a base on the moon.
On the moon, the scientists in deep space contact him, telling him that, according to their analysis, blowing up the largest satellite in orbit at a precise time will create debris that vaporizes the surrounding objects and reduce the overall density. So the pilot has to go against the leader of the moon colony’s orders, stealing a ship and a bomb, then goes into the debris field knowing there’s a chance he’ll die.
After the explosion, we see him in a spacesuit, his grappling hook on an asteroid as he flies around the Earth.
João Carlos Martins was a piano prodigy, but a series of setbacks robbed him of his gift.
First, he fell while playing soccer and severed his ulnar nerve. This nerve runs directly to the pinky and ring finger—both used while playing the piano. Nevertheless, he managed to keep playing piano after years of surgeries and therapy.
Then, while in Bulgaria recording an album at the age of 54, he was hit in the head with a metal pipe during a mugging. It resulted in him losing feeling on the right side of his body.
These setbacks resulted in the middle, ring, and pinky finger on his right hand curling inward.
Then, a designer saw Martins on a Brazilian tv show and designed a pair of gloves for him. They have steel bars on the fingers that pry open his hands and bounce back up after Martins plays a note, allowing him to play again.
He had tears in his eyes the first time he played piano with the gloves.
His life story would make an excellent book or movie.
We’d start out with him preparing for a packed concert, tears in his eyes while surrounded by his loved ones—including the gloves designer that made it possible. Then, as he walks onto the stage, we cut to the past, starting from his beginnings in Brazil and his journey to New York City.
The soccer injury would occur in the middle portion of the book, kicking off his clawing back from the nerve damage and dealing with losing piano forever. Thoughts of suicide and feelings of being lost.
Then, after his partial comeback, the mugging in Bulgaria leaves his body ruined, and he gives up piano altogether for conducting.
Until he meets with the designer, who jumps through hurdles to get him the gloves. The “battle” would be him not getting his hopes up, not believing the gloves would work. The peak of the action is when he puts the gloves on and plays for the first time with tears in his eyes.
Then, we return to the present, to the concert, and he goes out for his final performance and puts on one final perfect performance.
German scientists have discovered a new way of introducing oxygen into the brain of tadpoles: taking advantage of photosynthesis.
In essence, the experiment involved injecting algae into a tadpole’s heart. After traveling through the blood vessels, the algae reached the brain. Then, the scientists deprived the brain of oxygen, effectively ending neural activity.
The cool part? Shining a light restarted the neural activity again within minutes, showing that the algae were making oxygen via photosynthesis and supplying the brain!
The scientist’s next steps involve finding a way for the algae to exist in the blood vessels without triggering an immune response.
Turning this into a story: what if increased oxygen levels are found to boost intelligence levels?
Humans can inject algae into their hearts and boost the oxygen going to their brains in the far future. There are multiple variations, some with few side effects and others that significantly increase intelligence but come at a cost to the body.
The best versions cost the most money, creating a stratified society where the wealthy have access to the algae and the less fortunate can’t upgrade their intelligence.
Some people choose to keep the light shining on their brains at all times, while others do it while they sleep.
A young scientist, desperate for money, tries finding an alga that boosts muscular function as well as intelligence. During his quest, he removes the entire top of his skull so that he can bathe his brain in light at all times.
A rival corporation raids his lab, forcing him to inject the developed algae before completing his tests. The algae works, creating a super bright, super-strong human, but his lab is destroyed with the only samples he had from a plant in the Amazon.
The corporation kidnaps his wife and child, forcing him to work with them to recreate his findings. He succeeds in a second trial, rescuing his family, but creates a fellow superhuman with hideous deformities. The superhuman hunts him down, believing the scientist did it on purpose, setting up the final battle in a remote wooded location.
Other books could show the scientist working with governments to stop other powerful humans and highlight creating a team with abilities like his own that help him fight.
Ai-Da is an abstract artist who was given the honor of displaying her work at the Great Pyramid of Giza. Unfortunately, she almost didn’t make it because Egyptian authorities detained her under suspicion she was a spy.
Why? Because “she’s” an ultra-realistic robot programmed to create art. She was created by an interdisciplinary team of programmers, roboticists, and art experts and has an implanted modem and cameras for eyes.
The British Embassy got involved and convinced Cairo authorities the artist wasn’t a security threat, letting her and her creator into the country hours before the exhibition began.
Let’s turn this into a story. Instead of robot artists, let us broaden the utility and create robot laborers responsible for building and upgrading the United States’ crumbling infrastructure.
But, some states don’t permit robot laborers, while others use them exclusively.
The story revolves around a down on his luck single father looking for work. He crosses state lines regularly, coming back to see his kids.
He gets caught up in a group of anti-robot protestors, and together they engage in the illegal destruction of factories and resources.
The problem? With the extra time and resources created by the robot laborers, his children are living better than ever.
While he’s deep in the planning of a massive hit to the state’s robot force, he meets an old colleague who went back to school and learned to fix broken robots. But, he’s too far down the path towards radicalism and continues through with his planned destruction.
The authorities get wind of the plan, and he’s critically injured. He wakes up being attended to by a robot nurse and doctor and discovers he’s been given robot legs.
The story ends with him leading a group of robot laborers, working alongside them, in what we think is freedom, but he’s part of a chain gang when the camera pans out.
An international team of scientists discovered a planet with its atmosphere stripped away because of a planetary collision.
Planets running into each other isn’t uncommon in solar system formation—in fact, it’s believed that this is how Earth’s moon was created. But, the loss of an atmosphere is the first time scientists have observed this outcome of a collision.
They observed the phenomenon on an Earth-sized planet ninety-five light-years from Earth. Because of the dust cloud and gas around the star, they believe the atmosphere became dislodged 200k years ago after an impact of over 22k mph.
What if humans had to live underground or underwater because of the loss of the atmosphere?
Armageddon meets Silo, the story starts with the realization that there’s an impact coming in ten years. Then, the story centers on a young engineer and her family as they prepare for the move underground.
In an attempt to avoid the Seveneves problem—the first half of the book is an extended prologue for creating a space-faring society—the United States, Russia, and China already have extensive underground cities capable of housing millions because of their fear of nuclear war.
The challenges become who gets to live in the settlements, what happens to the rest of the people, and what happens to residents from other countries.
The engineer works tirelessly preparing underground settlements in Africa, spending years away from her family. They work on the energy problem, solar panels covering the Sahara, hopeful the impact doesn’t affect the desert.
Throughout work on the new facility, she deals with red tape and financial problems due to a single oil tycoon.
Then, she moves into the underground system in the United States and finds out she lives next to the man who caused her project so many problems. Thousands, if not millions, die because of him at the moment of impact.
She learns he’s siphoning off resources from their facility and risks her life for those less fortunate. So naturally, this puts a target on her back. In response, she descends to the lowest levels of the underground facility with her family, trying to stay away from their reach.
The oil tycoon’s cronies find their home and kidnap her husband and son. She takes the law into her own hands and fights her way through their fortifications until she rescues them from his side.
Sequels could include:
