NSE#5

 

Welcome to my presentation of the week's strange news, organized according to what the news inspired in my short fiction. This week I have three ideas, each with at least a tinge of science fiction and mystery.

Please leave a comment below mentioning which of the "page one" presentations you found the most interesting. And come back Monday for the next part of my novel, The Monolith, and next Friday for another Not Strangely Enough.

The real news behind 
"A Flash in the Web"

The first news I collected this week serves as the backbone for the first story I devised: a young man who passed away at the age of fifteen has been granted Sainthood for spreading religion via the internet. This seemed strange to me for a variety of reasons, but I decided to take the worst and strangest aspects and exaggerate them. Because that’s what I do. 

I’ve also incorporated a teacher who was covertly streaming illicit acts while teaching an in-person class, and, as a counter to that lewdness, a cyclist in the Tour de France who was fined for kissing his wife at the end of the race. Two moral issues a Saint may be interested in.

As a backdrop to my version of the young saint, I’ve added some corruption and villainy: a politician who had been gaming the system to get automatically elected—until his own friend hijacked his scheme; and an unfortunate Formula-1 racer whose family has been repeatedly blackmailed after his traumatic brain injury.

See for yourself if the first page displays enough of the drama I’m trying to bring to the table with all of the above...

The real news behind 
"Derelict Doubts"

What do you get when you combine: a man climbing atop a stadium to take photographs of the game below; a man urinating down the aisle of an airplane, mid-flight; a man wandering around until he gets lost in a sewer for three days; and a man who tried to rob a bank via a withdraw slip requesting one penny? 

Let’s be honest: it sounds like a few drunken fools getting themselves into trouble. So I decided to make it stranger than that, combing all four men into one man and infusing him with a science-fiction motive and context. 

I've also added some people investigating what he's been doing, but they may or may not be able to figure it out or even stop him. They may or may not even want to...

The real news behind 
"Man's Best Bot"

"Man’s Best Bot" explores the concepts of AI and robots and how we might have robotic companions in the future. More specifically, it explores how some people might think of these developments as a “corruption of nature.” 

I was initially inspired by a large amount of people wondering if a robot purposefully killed itself, along with another news story about a dog that accidentally started a house fire. The two stories coalesced in my mind into an idea for a robot dog that may or may not start a similar fire, and may or may not kill itself. 

Providing a backdrop to the robodog is a news story about a huge amount of stolen Lego sets, combined with two bits of flavor: a man arrested for shooting a drone and a man arrested for possessing a small, toy sword. 

Check out this first page introducing the new owner of a robotic pet as he gets into a conflict with a troublesome neighbor—much like one might get into while dealing with a new, but real, dog, but with the added element of it being a machine.