Unicorns and lions - recycling old tropes

I've been writing a short story about unicorns this week.  I know they're an old trope, but I hope I'm recycling it in a different way.  For starters, they're miniature horses, about the size of a Labrador dog.  And they have language.  And, most conveniently for my story, they're telepaths.  And even more handily, so is the reporter who befriended them.  

He needs to report on a trade convocation, but his paper's been barred from the proceedings. Cue the attack of the miniature unicorn.  The President is hosting this convocation, and she keeps unicorns as pets.  She never seems to notice how many of them are wandering around the palace, so it's an easy matter for my reporter to get his special friend smuggled in.   Where he will listen to all the conversations and stream them telepathically to my barred reporter.  Problem solved.

Another trope I've recycled in Genehunter is the lion-predator.  My alien Yull is certainly big, powerful, and predatory, but that's not all he is.  His people live in prides like lions, although there are many males in a tribe.  And they elect their leader in a democratic process, not by fighting.  They have written and oral language, and a fair degree of tech too.  And they have two arms and hands in addition to their four legs.  Yull is a complex, intelligent being, with his own problems and challenges.  

And I think that's the key to successfully recycling old tropes.  We usually think of unicorns as fantasy creatures, but my story is firmly SF.  We're on a different world, and the unicorns are natives there.  With Yull, I've retained the lion's pack-hunting way of life on the savannah. I researched lion hunts, and found that they too have their favourite positions.  They have their flankers and the individual who goes in to make the kill.  That was something I could easily adapt for the Ur-Vai.

So although unicorns and talking lions might be old ideas, there are still new ways of using them within a story.  And now I just hope that Villjo survives his fight with the upstart Ur-Vai Ahri.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Original combinations of ideas

Truly original ideas in SF are hard to find.  The genre has been around so long that most of the original themes have been well mined by now.  So how do we make a contribution to the genre?  How do we find something new to say?

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.