Hey everyone. I am beginning work on my first attempt at a novel. I've written some short stories when I was younger for class assignments but never anything with as much depth as I'm trying to do with this story. As such, I'm feeling a bit lost at how to best develop the plot. It is a sci fi story, set possibly 1000 years in the future when space colonization is blooming and territories are expanding. Ive gotten it to a point that the main character has a goal, to find his family that went missing during a war, but I want the reason for the missing family to be a conspiracy. Something about an impending attack on the main society's infrastructure, toppling a government, using a terrorist group as a cover.... But I really don't have much knowledge of such subject matter, nor have I ran across it in any books I've read. Would any of you happen to have thoughts on how to work out this type of scenario, or books with a similar plot I could read? Many thanks in advance David.
You could take a look at the third volume of Michael Z. Williamson's "Freehold series". It is about an SF plot that devastates Earth (who are the bad guys in this series). The book can be read alone, but the background makes more sense if you read all three.
Maybe you could take a look at some leading conspiracies that are out there now, read up on why they are conspiracies as a way to help you engineer one that will fit into your story. There are a number of conspiracies ranging from 9/11 to the Roswell incident with anything and everything in between so you're bound to find something that will help. Good luck with it, sounds very thought provoking!
Make his family the scientists/computer programmers who developed whatever technology the bad guys are going to use to perpetrate their attack. They could either go missing because the bad guys want them to build something, or be abducted and imprisoned by the GOOD guys who think they are working for the baddies.
There may be a tyrranic goverment his family was trying to overcome. The conspiracy was discovered and they had to escape. Maybe they uncovered a huge goverment corruption and they "disappeared" before they could reveal it Maybe his family were in fact terrorists following a fanatic movement.
The fun part about conspiracies is the creation of them in your story. I think perhaps right now your subject area is too broad for you to develop a conspiracy as there are infinite possibilities. Perhaps try building the plot a bit more, adding structure and outline to your ideas and where you want the story to go, then create a conspiracy which supports that. One of your challenges is the setting in the future, as any conspiracy is possible; you have no constraints. My WIP is historical and present-day and so my conspiracy has to be rooted in historical "fact", which, makes it easier to construct as my options become more limited. Don't know if it will work, but try fleshing out the story more and construct the conspiracy afterward. Good luck...
How about the family was accidentally exposed to a contagious pathogen that the government was secretly trying to harness for use as a bioweapon against the enemy. Now the family is missing and has to be found before they can spread the infection, while the government is denying that the entire particular bioweapon development program even exists.
