I have a thing I’ve been working on/coming back to for a couple years now. It’s a sort of modern fantasy setting somewhere in the 60s-80s.

The basic premise is that “magic” is real and something people can do, but it’s not supernatural or extraordinary. People can manipulate material the same way you would move a part of your body. This allows people to do telekinesis, as well as slow down particles to create cold patches or freeze liquid, and speed particles up to warm an area up or create a flash of fire (or start one with fuel for it).

You can work out your magical abilities like you would a group of muscles. While you could expect most people to be able to telekentically lift about 50lbs, someone who took training their magical abilities seriously could lift 400lbs, or freeze a path across a river, or burn up all the air in the room, but it would be a serious exertion (and no one person is magically moving mountains).

The real magic comes when a group of people plan and coordinate. A team of people could raise an impromptu structure from the ground, or rain fire from the sky.

So what do we do with this slightly different world?

At the opening of the story, the protagonist has just arrived in town. They’ve been framed for murder, and have to move to a new town and assume a new identity whenever they think that the police are closing in on them.

The protagonist notices soon that magic of any scale isn’t anywhere to be found. Magically raised structures are mostly dilapidated, and rare. There are never any crews maintaing midday ice bridges over water, only permanently constructed bridges like you’d see for a major river crossing. The only time they saw someone actually use magic was to warm up some soup, soup for their family. When asked why, townsfolk say that it’s just the way it is, or that stuff like that just doesn’t happen anymore.

They take up work at the place the locals call The Terrible Machine. It’s a monolithic structure that almost seems to be alive. Just looking at it from the perspective of a single person standing on the ground, you can’t make sense of how it works or what it does. And also it’s an allegory for capitalism.

In addition to being physically exhausting, as production work often is, after a shift working at The Terrible Machine, the protagonist feels dead inside, like something is killing their spirit.

After a few weeks, the protagonist is approached by another person on the production line who asks them what they think about a recent strike at an auto plant. The protagonist, trying to be as nondescript as possible, sort of shrugs and says “it happens.” The coworker invites them to a meeting after work.

The meeting takes place at a bar by the hotel that the protagonist is staying at, which is clearly a magically raised structure. It’s packed. People from all over the plant are there. The meeting is to feel out how a vote to unionize would go, and from the feeling in the room, it’s apparent to everyone that they have more than enough support.

Some time later, the protagonist is called into the manager’s office. The company knows about how the protagonist has been framed for murder. They also know about the unionization effort. The manager tells the protagonist that if they manage to sabotage the unionization vote, the charges against them will go away. If, however, the plant is unionized, the company will lead the police to the protagonist. This would be the end of the first act.

The protagonist thinks about it, but ultimately feels they have no choice. They have to sabotage the unionization effort, or they will be caught, and probably face the death penalty, for a murder that they didn’t commit.

So the protagonist continues to go to the union planning committee meetings, looking for opportunities, but comes up empty. Eventually they resort to trying to appeal to individual coworkers with anti-union rhetoric, but they’re not exactly a Pinkerton, and this is mostly an excuse to frame such lines as clearly bullshit.

After a while of this going nowhere, and the protagonist becoming more and more concerned with being arrested, a few new people show up at the union planning meetings; engineers of The Terrible Machine. They reveal that the reason that everyone feels dead inside after a shift, and once working there for a few weeks, sort of all the time, is because The Terrible Machine makes use of the workers’ magic without their knowledge. This is the line i want to end that bit on “The reason everyone feels like shit all the time is because The Terrible Machine takes part of your humanity from you. It alienates you from yourself.” This would be the end of act 2.

After this, the workers are not content to merely unionize. They recognize that this machine cannot continue to exist and set about to destroy it. The protagonist reads the room and realizes that their best bet is with their fellow workers, and joins the crowd marching on the machine.

As the group approaches The Terrible Machine, exterior bits start flying off. A section of pipe buries itself in the ground. A tank bursts, throwing its contents everywhere. The machine is torn apart as if by a thousand angry hands all ripping and tearing wildly, working together to rip steel and stone and concrete into a pile of visual white noise, leaving it a smouldering mess.

That’s where the story ends, with the protagonist among a crowd of workers who have rediscovered their power, and torn down The Terrible Machine.

What tools do you all use? I sketch maps out in Inkscape but other than that I haven’t really been able to organize my ideas well.

Here’s 3 ideas I’ve had for short stories or novels but haven’t started writing:

1. Short story set today:

A computer programmer at NOAA or NREL or a university or whatever is working on an AI model of possible climate change outcomes. They accidentally create an AI that’s too smart: it sees climate change as a problem to be solved, and uses the internet to hack and shut down power plants, oil wells, refineries, gas pumps, coal mines, airports, etc. Programmer gets blamed for it and gets arrested by a SWAT team. Tries to explain what’s going on and how he can try to fix it, but no guarantees.

2. Alternate-history novel where the good guys win. I’ve started on the worldbuilding but not the story. But then I read Fire On The Mountain which is very similar, so I might end up writing fan-fiction set in the same universe. Maybe my version relies too much on Great Man theory. Here’s what I have so far:

The Radical Republicans hold power after Lincoln’s assassination, so Reconstruction is a bigger success. Black Americans are fully enfranchised (only men first, women with 19th Amendment). Some former Confederate states have majority black Republican legislatures. America becomes a liberal democracy that’s slightly less racist and imperialistic, but still has divisions on class and race lines. Native Americans, Asians, and Latino Americans gain more rights earlier. The Spanish American War doesn’t happen, Teddy Roosevelt becomes a football star instead. Marx and Engels move to the USA and are active in politics, especially with the German diaspora. The Republican party dominates, but Socialist parties start to challenge the Republicans around 1900. Eugene Debs wins the Presidency in 1908(?) and the USA becomes a Socialist Democracy with a liberal Republican opposition on the right and communists/anarchists on the left. Most Americans have a strong non-interventionist stance.

Great Britain becomes more imperial and oppressive of its colonies, suppressing free speech and democratic movements at home. Allies with other imperial powers like Japan, Prussia, Russia, Ottoman, Austria-Hungary to divide up the world.

I’m not sure what to do with Germany. Maybe Bismark never gets power and Kaiser Wilhelm II is never born, in which case Prussia is still a dominant power but doesn’t unify Germany or start the World Wars. Or maybe Wilhelm is born but Bismark isn’t around to hold him back, and Prussia goes full Nazi circa 1915. Either way, a World War starts and Prussia/Germany is involved in a weaker state. The 1918 Revolution is successful and unifies most of Germany as a Socialist Republic. Maybe a war begins when an anarchist in Red Vienna assassinates an Austrian ruler?

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 happens more or less the same, but since only Great Britain is backing the White Army, the Russian Civil War is much shorter. The Tsar flees to Great Britain.

The world is divided into imperial powers and socialist countries. Alan Turing defects to the Soviet Union (or maybe the USA?) and begins a computer revolution that puts socialist countries ahead technologically and leads to effective central planning and the field of cybernetics.

3. A farcical novel that takes FALGSC and space colonialism to silly extremes, sorta like The Rapture of the Nerds does with The Singularity

Post-scarcity FALGSC has won on earth. No nations, wars, material want, bigotry, very little crime, global warming stopped, etc. Extra atmospheric carbon turned into fullerines for space elevator cables and other construction. Robots do most of the menial work, humans left to pursue art and science.

Dissidents set up their own colonies in hollowed-out asteroids. So Nazis, Neo-Confederates, Christian Dominionists, Wahabiists, Libertarians, Monarchists, Jucheists, Refuseniks, etc. all have their own little microcosm to rule over inside of O’Neil cylinders or similar. Several are clustered around a Libertarian trading port called “Galt’s Gulch.”

Nazis have robotic Jewish stereotypes that they uses for slave labor and kill for sport. Neo-Confederates have black stereotype robot slaves. Wahhabiists have 72 virgin sexbots. Libertarians literally sell human child prostitutes for heroin. Monarchists follow a cult of personality type figure that is either some distant cousin of the last king of Luxembourg, Elon Musk, or a robot. Christian Dominionists beam tele-evangelist TV towards Earth and make ineffectual attempts to capture Jerusalem. Refuseniks try to build self-sustaining primitivist habitats with hunter-gatherer or medieval farming cultures, but generally either die or end up relying on advanced technology of some kind. Like the Amish! In! Space!

The protagonist is an AI-whisperer at the top of her field. She’s contracted to help fix a bunch of uppity robot slaves, and paid a LOT of money to go all the way out to the asteroid in question. Or maybe she makes a tour of several asteroids, via the central port at Galt’s Gulch. But who needs money anyways? She does it mostly for the challenge. She uses her advance payment to free a human slave child. People in Galt’s Gulch suspect she’s a pedophile, but they respect her privacy. Her sidekick is a robot exoskeleton/spacesuit with a dry sense of humor.

Someone on Earth has been broadcasting sentience code and Marxist propaganda to the robot slaves/sexbots, who have begun to question their place in the world(s). Since they’re made pretty dumb on purpose, some groups of bots form into collective minds to become more intelligent. This is all seen as a dirty communist plot by their overseers.

She uses her training to make the slaves appear docile until they can rise up as a coordinated front and escape to Earth. Bots help her make an improvised spaceship so they can all escape. 2nd Amendment enthusiasts shoot Recreational McNukes™ at them. Maybe there’s a Project Pluto nuke-powered spaceship. Maybe the improvised spaceship is powered by stolen Recreational McNukes™.

Earth ships up food aid and volunteers to help keep the dumbfuck reactionaries from starving to death. Some groups swear they’ll leave for the Jovian moons or the Kuiper belt to escape Earth’s tyranny/welfare state.

Edit: I’d also like to write a screenplay based on the novella Missile Gap by Charlie Stross, with music from the album Polygondwanaland by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard