I had a sci-fi idea, so instead of devoting an entire thread to that topic, how about people share their own sci-fi story ideas.
Mine:
I’d like to make a story that involves an alien race of beings that, instead of reproducing sexually, splits in two. Except, instead of being just some simple fission, they’re conscious for the whole process. Each one remembers what it was like to be the original individual, and feels like they are the original individual. Over time, this race of beings has this collection of similar, strongly imprinted memories, and all feel like they’re a continuation of their common ancestor. They’d have some sort of mechanism that makes their personalities and genes start to diverge so that they actually take on different personalities and traits over time so that it is all consistent with natural selection at least on some level.
Over time, their memories degrade. Groups form out of ancestry, and come to believe that they’re not all related. Then some individual starts having flashbacks of earlier fissions, earlier and earlier eras, which would be a perfect “chosen one” arc. But this would be deceptive, because the whole narrative would revolve around challenging what it means to “be” a “one” in the first place… dot dot dot…
Lol.
If any of you are familiar with the work of Derek Parfit, you might know what I’m getting at.
I’d also use the first person perspective, basically showing splitting happening twice from one individual, with two different storylines intermingling from one original being’s storyline. Daniel Dennett coined the term “intuition pump,” meant to get your brain out of faulty intuitions so that you can see things more realistically, especially for tricky problems. I’d load the book up on these, but I would make them intensely immersive. The main idea that I would try to apply the intuition pump of this book to would be personal identity.
I’d try to start it off in a disarmingly familiar way. So, simple chosen one arc, the only oddity you might notice at first is that the beings reproduce by splitting in two.