This might seem like an odd thing to worry about, given that the genre deals so heavily with such fantastical ideas, but is there a point at which these ideas risk losing a reader's conviction? Time-travel, for instance, is just about as fantastical as things get. We're not going to see it in our lifetime, and several generations after us are not going to see it either. But, there are at least theories out there which suggest how this might happen, what would be involved, the risks, how long a 'travel' would really take, etc etc. Now, while an idea I'm mulling over for my WiP seems to be, at least on the surface, far less 'out there' and unbelievable, there's no real logic or theoretical suppositions to back it up. I'm talking here about capturing memories and recording a 'hard copy', so that others are then able to view them in much the same perspective as we see computer games that use a first-person perspective. The idea that a memory can be saved and represented is such a way, has no real logic or basis in any fact. But is it safe to assume that sci-fi readers would overlook this? In my head, the 'recordings' would look something like this when viewed:
I'd say that's a definite yes. If it's trying to be hard sf, then you might have some problems, but as long as you're talking about the social/personal ramifications of this technology rather than how it's supposed to work, you're good. Isn't there actually an episode of Black Mirror with a similar concept? I don't mean that in a "this is unoriginal" way, just that I'm pretty sure it's an idea people've swallowed before, so. Edit: wait, no, as soon as I hit post I remembered that that episode was about recording things you've seen, not memories. Never mind on that front. I still think it's fine, though.
You watch "Black Mirror?" One of the early episodes, "The Grain," deals with this exactly. Everyone has a chip in their brain that records their life verbatim to be shared and replayed later. Tragedy and hilarity ensue, of course.
I get bored of sci-fi that explains how things work, so that'd be totally believable to me. Really, it's not much more unbelievable than machines that read our thoughts, and there's a lot of that in sci-fi.
Not to discourage you, but it's been done, and rather well IMHO, by Hollywood. Strange Days (1995) From Wikipedia:
Thank you all. I'm pretty confident to go ahead with this now. @Iain Aschendale - not seen that but I'm always on the lookout for good sci-fi films and will certainly be hunting this one down. Thankfully the idea plays a very small part in the plot, so I'm not worried so much. Stuff like this gets recycled all the time, doesn't it?
ST: Deep Space 9 had an episode where prisoners were punished by being implanted with the memories of past prisoners. I like your idea. It's really a matter of execution, in my opinion.
I watched this earlier. It wasn't bad at all. Rather odd that such a wild concept was presented as something that would come along so soon (the setting was late December of 1999 - just five years on from the date of filming) but then again the turn-of-the-century celebrations did play somewhat of a key part in the proceedings, so I suppose tat was their excuse. Thank you. I can't pretend it's not a disappointed when an idea I come up with - which I didn't knowingly steal from another source - turns out to have already been done in exactly the same way. Of course the seed was planted with films/books like Total Recall, but the whole selling of memories on the black market was, I thought, a great idea I'd conjured up. I even developed the whole 'snuff memory' concept, only to find this film deals with exactly that. It's true what they say. It really is impossible to come up with a plot/theme which is a genuinely original one-off.
Tell me about it, Terry Pratchett went and stole one of my ideas a full twenty years before I thought of it. The audacity of that man....
Yeah! Man it smarts even more when you realise 'your' brilliant idea is decades old! I need to stop discussing this now, as I can genuinely feel a horrible sense that my novel is going to turn out as just about the most unoriginal sci-fi novel ever written. Happily I take some comfort in the fact that this concept is not even nearly with us yet, so on those grounds it can still be fresh.
