Most of the time when we're casting our nets out for plots we're going to come up with ideas that have been used before. What we're into is reshuffling old elements. But when we do so, the resultant combination is salted and affected by our beliefs and values. And our writers'unique voices will ensure that the way we tell the story of those ideas won't be like anything that has gone before. Or it shouldn't be, if you've claimed your own voice and use it.
I confess to doing this combining of ideas often in my work, in Eyemind I took Anne McCaffrey's brainships and applied the idea to a landbound Supercruiser. Her brain became my Mind, her brawn my Mobile. My favourite book of the brainship series is The Ship Who Searched, which has an archaeology background. I changed that background to the world of art. And I made my story a criminal investigation of suspect artworks. Old ideas, but combined in a new way.
I'm a great fan of Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books, but I don't want to write about military characters. So in my novel Starfire I turned Kylara Vatta into Ria Bihar. Like Ky, Ria starts her trading life as an independent, but unlike Ky, Ria stays a Trader. She does have military connections, though. She's forced to team up with an alien military to recover a vital artefact.
I used to worry about the fact that I couldn't come up with leading-edge shiny tech. It took me a while to realise that SF is as much about the cultures, politics, and social structures that tech facilitates and creates as it is about the hardware. These days I'm more likely not to worry about inventing something brand shiny new. I'm more likely to use someone else's invention and see where it takes me.
I've finally got comfortable with the idea of re-using old ideas. If my characters are string enough and my voice my own, chances are my readers will still want to know about them.
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