Sci Fi story idea - comments please?

[Limnophile]

I had an idea for a new story I'd like to write.

Imagine a far future where humans live 1,000 years and look 20-ish for several centuries. Children get reversible sterilization and a sexual desire suppressant until they finish their PhD-level educations at about age 25. After that, parents teach them about sex and help them practice until they reach full legal maturity at 40 years' old.

A 'young' woman leaves home and meets a handsome stranger. They fall in love, only to find out he is her great-great grandfather.

The above is legally and socially okay, since all pregnancies are planned, and genetic screening and embryo implantation prevent any health problems caused by incest.

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Do you know of any stories like this? If not, do you think it would make a good story?

 

[Carnevil9]

My preference in stories is that ther be some kind of hook or conflict that drives the energy. That’s just me.

I feel like your scenario is so sci fi that it loses the incest tension you seem to be after - particularly with your statement that it is socially and legally acceptable

That was my thought, exactly. Where is the conflict? Where is the drama?

Yes, you have created a very interesting story universe, and one that is quite compelling. But you still have to put an interesting story into it to make a good work of literature. You have to give the reader something to care about, something to worry about, something to make him want to keep reading.

 

[DukeStone]

They're both correct. You need conflict at least implied. Whether it comes from the incest hook or an outside conflict. Maybe a Logan's run approach where they don't want the sterility of modern pregnancy techniques and decide to run with the government and perhaps family chasing them. Whatever you choose you need the conflict to make it q true story

 

[FantasySharer1]

You can keep the 1000 years thing as well as the parents teaching their kids.
Have the dad and daughter fall insanely in love while he's teaching her. And that's still a taboo.

Slowly, the mother's role gets diminished till the point that she's largely a creampie cleaner for her daughter's pussy. Father and daughter have a son together. Mom is still expected to be loyal to her husband.

18 years later, the mother starts to replace her grandson's desire suppressants with placebos. She and the grandson fall in love. Daughter and Father find Mom and Grandson (who is also Daughter and Father's son) fucking in the bedroom. They are outraged.


Mom has already told grandson everything. He LOVES his grandmother's pussy and wants to be with her for the rest of his life. There's a fight. It ends up resolved with a foursome, eventually.

 

[LupusDei]

Maybe said great great grandfather is from the first generation(s) of such "immortals" hold old fashioned views that incest is not okay (and haven't yet trained his immediate children that way), unlike the girl who doesn't understand what's even the problem and why he's trying to call quits finding out they're in fact family.

Would also serve great as an excuse for her to explain at length how she sees the (new) society working while he's pointing out differences and describes, perhaps idealized, version of the old ways, that, of course, seem completely bewildering to the girl (how might "underage" youngsters fumbled discovering each other bodies during hormone storms, that's so absurd, and tolerating unsupervised random genetics, why).

Then, ideally there's something why and how it matters, but everything I might come up with at the moment takes focus off the incest... maybe because that's not quite my thing anyway.

 

[sirhugs]

My preference in stories is that ther be some kind of hook or conflict that drives the energy. That’s just me.

I feel like your scenario is so sci fi that it loses the incest tension you seem to be after - particularly with your statement that it is socially and legally acceptable

Basic writing tropes:
conflict is what traditionallly drives dramas.
Incongruity creates comedy.
So it is not just you

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Incest, by which I mean in this case intimacy with relatives, is a popular fictional theme here mainly due to that shiver of the forbidden, the rule-breaking. IRL, there are good reasons for that sort of relationship being illicit. Now, what about your hypothetical society?

First off, g-g-grandrelatives share, what, six percent of genes? Health risks are like those of marrying third cousins - trivial - and you have already worked out how to eliminate it entirely. The first, perhaps the major, reason for frowning on incest is gone.

Which leaves morality and/or societal standards. Consider however that in a society with a long-living population, this sort of thing is going to be relatively common. Given a 1,000 year lifespan, that’s 50 generations. (OK, cut that in half because they don’t breed until 40. It’s still 25 generations.) If every person marries and each couple has but two offspring, you’re still going to see any one couple, call them Adam and Eve, sharing the planet with over 33 million descendants before they finally kick off. The very concept of incest is going to have to shift. Would you, for instance, think it incestuous if you had sex with one of your own ancestors born before Hastings, before the Crusades, before the Toltecs in the Americas had fallen? Probably not.

OK, enough pedantry. It’s a fun concept, but as others have noted, there needs to be some drama or a hook and I fear that it’s going to be a hard slog to make that incest or even that somebody you fall in love with being a distant relative. The tingle just isn't there.

The idea has potential, so congratulations on its novelty and good luck. I hope you let us know where this goes.

 

[ElliottEden]

So.

This is almost a variation of A. E. van Vogt "The Empire of Ishar" series. Well - in his case it was one immortal. It gets a bit complicated and... Well. Ol' van Vogt had a consistent trope - the one smartest guy in the room guiding <fill in the blank here> to success.

In the society you posit population becomes a problem. Either - in a Heinlein sense where everyone is a lusty participant in pollination; or in an Asimov reverse where individuals are so isolated that to procreate is a rare and distasteful event. So in one case population grows as everyone is happily rutting and breeding while in the other population shrinks.

Either way provides a bit to a story arc. But consider. A society advanced enough to do the things you suggest probably also has the ability to 'correct' genetic defects. So incest is more a cultural taboo than a biological - which you suggest. In fact there may be cases where incest would be encouraged by the happy social planners so as to reinforce certain traits.

And indeed - a society that can control things will. The temptation to improve things would be great - and I'd think traits deemed undesirable could be bred out of a gene pool.

Ol' great grandpappy might be a member of a group of other oldsters who have seen the results of such 'progress' - have concerns - and decide to, er, uh, bend the curve? Get the great granddaughter preggers with his more original, uncorrected DNA?

 

[JaxRhapsody]

That sounds like a story nearly based of Lits rules.

 

[Limnophile]

Thanks to everyone for the opinions and advice.

I'm thinking I'll make the young woman MC and her great-great-grandfather part of a much larger sci-fi adventure story. G-G-gramps is one of the first 'immortals', in love with her but morally conflicted when they discover their relation. As what seems like a minor bit of background, they hear news that a 'super-do-hickey' (haven't decided on type of device - tiny and nearly free power source? wormhole generator? ultimate weapon?) has been invented and a technician disappeared with the prototype and only copy of the plans. Eventually G-G-gramps decides he can't stand the guilt anymore and leaves her for another hottie he's not related to.

She finds a new boyfriend who was practically a sex slave to his widowed mother until he ran away. His submissive personality allows her to get out the pain and anger at being abandoned by spanking him, etc. They have a chance encounter with a hot couple who happen to be the 'super-do-hickey' thief and her husband/uncle. The group flee from world to world trying to find a safe way to sell it as they experience many strange settings and societies. In the year 4,500 humanity would have spread to thousands of other planets. On worlds that are densely populated people are only allowed to have one child, plus an extra one or two as rewards if they do something great. On freshly settled planets, they can have as many as they like. Some small new societies would even give a reward for having lots of kids.

In the setting I'm imagining people are physically mature at about 18-19 like the real world. They are reversibly sterilized and given sexual desire inhibitors as young children, and at 20 they get a treatment which greatly slows aging. They start looking 30-ish at 400 years old and gradually lose their ability to reproduce once middle-age sets in at 800. Many decide they've lived long enough and agree to euthanasia before reaching maximum longevity at 1,200.

On most worlds, parents have custody of their children until they are 40 and teach them sex from age 25 to 40. A special area of each community is reserved for schools and parents with children. Only people 25 or older are allowed to leave, and regaining fertility only requires a short doctor visit once they reach 40.

The idea that people aren't allowed to even think about sex until they are 25 or marry before they are 40, ABSOLUTELY IS based on the rules of Lit and other restrictive websites. With anybody under 25 safely confined to school or home, the rest of the world can do whatever they want, wherever they want. This frees up the possibility of outdoor orgies in public parks, horny couples screwing leaned against a building downtown or on city transit, nude bicycle or foot races, advertising billboards with product names around a screen that plays porn... pick your favorite Voyeur/Exhib fantasy.

It also makes 'age room' to include a planet where a rebellious religious group arranges marriages for their children at the shockingly young and illegal age of only 21.

I expect it to be a very long story, probably 1/4 million words or more, so I doubt I'll publish it next month. LOL

Thanks again for the ideas!

Any more opinions or suggestions?

 

[AlinaX]

Makes me wonder how elves handle the whole attracted-to-your-great-granddaughter thing.

 

[NegateGivity]

Makes me wonder how elves handle the whole attracted-to-your-great-granddaughter thing.

That's easy. ️ MAGIC ️