[theDood]

I was sitting back on the ol' couch, and watching some Late Night with Conan O'Brien and a good speculative fiction idea popped into my head. Whenever this happens I always say to myself, "When is someone gonna write something like that?!".

My question is do you ever get these instances and if so, what kind of ideas pop into your head?

Oh yeah, and my idea was a robot vs. humanity war in the form of military fiction. Think of The Second Renaissance from The Matrix.

I have a feeling this should be in another section, and I'm sorry if it should.

[Tony Williams]

Yes, I got a great idea while writing Scales. I wanted to include parallel worlds, but not too many of them, so I invented the concept of "braided worlds", in which most of the worlds come back together again like the braided channels in a river; it takes a major event to permanently establish an alternative, parallel, world.

After I had written that, I re-read Sheri Tepper's The Marianne Trilogy - a terrific fantasy, by the way - for the first time in 15 years and there it was: the braided worlds idea. I had completely forgotten it, but my subconscious must have remembered it and pulled it out.

I suspect that there aren't many truly original ideas, we just recycle more-or-less digested memories without being aware of it.