Ideas You Might Borrow – 2025

Being nearly 75 years old, I find have more interesting ideas that I can ever write up myself.  So I decided to expand on what I wrote in 2021. Here are more things I hope someone else might pick up.  Everything original should be viewed as ‘public domain’.

Gwydion M. Williams

Topics in Society As a Whole

  • A Mass Survey of Talent and Genius.  People with money could organise it.  Maybe getting the Nobel Committee to sponsor it
    I would have it that the organisers send out invites almost at random.  Mostly to the talented, subscribing to intellectual sites, but also including some who might be rated as geniuses.  We’ll probably also include some unrecognised geniuses or those who will show genius later.
    One thing I’d expect it to show is disproportionate numbers of gays and bisexuals among the talented.  I’d decided you’d not get anti-reproductive inheritance unless there were a balancing advantage.  And regardless, it should motivate gays to be among the supporters of the project.
  • “Are you OK?” Independent agencies to provide a cheap and reliable daily check-up service for the old or sick living alone.  A simple phone-call, e-mail or contact through social media.  Needy younger people subsidised to provide a bit of friendship.  Not so different from having a weekly cleaner and other well-established
    Allow several, rather than one giant government agency that would want to be uniform.  But they would need a government license to prevent the obvious possibility of frauds.
  • The Fatima Miracle of the Sun as a Fraud? The supposed apparition of the Virgin Mary warned about Portugal joining the First World War. Someone might have thought a fake justified to save lives. Maybe done with an airship and mirrors.
    It is a complex matter, but I have blogged about it, https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/The-Fatima-Miracles-a-Pious-Fraud-Seeking-Peace
  • Demonstrate Lying By Omission.  A teacher would set half their class to collect bad stories about people called Smith, and good stories about people called Jones.  The other half, selected randomly, do the reverse.
    Demonstrate how selected truths can produce a false picture.  I did this for claims of Labour anti-Semitism when they first floated the story – “Tunbridge Wells has a Drugs and Murder Problem” https://gwydionwilliams.com/048-anti-semitism-and-zionism/fewer-anti-semites-in-labour-than-tories/.  The trick that racists do with immigrants, who commit fewer crimes than the rest of the population.
    Smith and Jones have the advantage of not being associated with any ethnic or religious identity.  The two most common names in England and Wales.
    This could be done at many levels, from Primary School to Universities and Adult Training.  And foreign countries could do the same for their common and generalised names.
  • What if the USA had Banned Immigration in the 1850s?  Check which famous names would be missing if the ‘Know Nothing’ movement had managed to get a ban on all future immigration, regardless of race or religion. 
    Family origins are sometimes complex, of course.  If I were running it, I’d delete anyone who had less than 75% of their ancestors already in the USA by 1860.
    Most of those missing would be Jewish, but not all.  I can think of some non-Jewish Britons, including Charley Chaplain and Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy.  And I’d expect some surprises if the project looked hard.
  • “Committing Suicide Would Have Ruined The Rest Of My Life”.  People who came close to suicide or who survived suicide to talk to teenagers in school classes and explain how they got obsessed by some sorrow, mostly a failed relationship, that now seems trivial. 
    Often someone they are glad they didn’t try marrying.
    It would probably be best for each speaker to go somewhere far away from where they live, and not give their real name.  And to be honest, because any suspicion of trickery would spoil it
  • A role-playing game in which some of the characters are more cooperative if you speak in their own language seems to me an effective way to teach languages.  Pure speculation, but maybe worth someone trying.  My logic is that the human mind resists getting cluttered up with useless facts, and so resists learning things that seem to have no point.  But games often teach children things they need later to solve the problems of real life.
  • Median kids.  A documentary with children at various ages who are around average intelligence and have no notable strengths and weaknesses.  Get them solving problems a computer would have trouble with.  Show that they have worth in themselves.
  • The Merits of Caution and Moderation.  Most moderates are not cowards, nor weak.  Historically, they have been much better at getting what they want than the bombast brigade, who tend to achieve nothing. 
    One instance would be the Kwantung Army of Imperial Japan, see the next section.  But many others exist
  • Dangerous Bear Invasions.  People don’t want to shoot them, but they do damage.  Why not have someone with a hose that can drench the bears with something that smells foul. but which humans can easily neutralise?  Teach the bears to stay away from people?

Topics in Modern History & Politics

The Soviet Union and China have their own sections, shown later on.

  • The Hitler Games,  The disputes within Western countries about attending the Berlin Olympics in 1936.  One German Jewish fencer got on the German team – there is a book this, Hitler’s Jewish Olympian.  But Harold Abrahams, Jewish hero of the film Chariots of Fire, argued against a boycott.  It is a tricky moral issue.
    Spain with its new left-wing government was the only regular participant who stayed away.  They organised their own alternative, but this was caught up in the military coup against this elected government.
    The Soviet Union did not participate in any Olympics until 1952.  Tsarist Russia had no official teams, but three Russians participated as individuals in 1900 and they had a team in 1912.
  • The Meretricious Nobel Prize for Economics.  A Swedish bank somehow persuading the overseers of the greatly respected Nobel Prizes to allow a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to be created in 1968.   A prize commonly lumped with the others, which have been awarded since 1901.
    I found it interesting that they also put a ban on themselves creating any more such extras.  And can’t help wondering if some of the Nobel Committee were influenced by offers of officially-unconnected grants to research they cared a lot about.
    It was used to give respectability to New Right ideas.  And helped boost the profits of banks.
  • The Army That Wrecked Imperial Japan.  The Kwantung Army of Imperial Japan seems not to have a book or English-language documentary about its specific crimes.  They conquered Manchuria, but could not be bothered to let ‘Manchukuo’ look credible.  And they were among the military fanatics who murdered anyone who suggested that Imperial Japan could flourish without being so aggressive.  And their road ended by the Soviet army thoroughly smashing them at the same time as the USA showed a commitment to additional mass slaughter with the atom bombs.  More had died in the intentional fire-bombing of Tokyo, but it took a number of hard blows to convince the extremists that macho aggressiveness was not as smart as its admirers thought. 
    They also did the only serious experiments on human victims that has been confirmed to have been tried – the Nazi stuff was mostly worthless tinkering by death-camp doctors.  That was Unit 731, and the USA covered it up and let off the criminals in exchange for their data.
    It would be useful as a general educational tool more than another way to get at Japan, though they did earn it.  It would be a nice example of what does not work long-term.  Liberal leaders tend to be good at mixing soft and hard policies to get the desired result.
  • Two that are detailed on the 2021 page –
    Alexander Wedderburn, who was involved in the loss of British North America and with an interesting neglected personal history.
    John Robison, who worked on an unsuccessful steam car along with James Watt. And later invented the modern Conspiracy Theory, though his was just about Freemasons and never mentioned Jews.
    You can get details from my book about Adam Smith. Hard to find, but much of it is on-line here.

Topics in Existing Fiction

  • Someone could do a popular book about Denis Wheatly, once an extremely popular writer and now almost forgotten.  Give details of the sales figures he once had.  Show how much attitudes have changed.
  • Likewise the Sanders of the River series by Edgar Wallace.  Very racist, but also good story telling.

Topics in Science

  • Central Fire – some Ancient Greeks argued that the sun was the centre of the solar system, though we know few details.  But Pythagoreans were reported as believing that both the Sun and Earth revolved around a ‘Central Fire’.
    Did the Pythagoreans do the same calculations as Copernicus, and find that the centre was not quite where the sun was?
  • Ghosts In The Atom: the mistakes before full discovery.  Notably Lord Kelvin’s Vortex Theory of the Atom, Hantaro Nagaoka’s Saturnian model of the atom, and J.J. Thomson’s Plum Pudding Model.
    Ask if Rutherford included the possibility of extreme deflections when he fired things at the atom, because he wanted to allow for the unpopular Japanese theory being true.  And if so, was he fair about it?  A lot of race prejudice in physics.
    And a close but separate topic.  The standard story is that Becquerel discovered radioactivity by testing photographic plates that had not been exposed to sunlight, expecting to find nothing.  But I read somewhere in a popular science book that two other researchers had encountered this.  The first blamed the manufacturer for supplying defective plates, but the second decided it might be something in the Uranium.  Did Becquerel know of this and suppress it, to improve the glory of his grand discovery?
  • Truths About Heaven.  The story of French Rationalists denying that meteorites were real.  There must be details in French, for someone who can easily read it.
    Someone writing such a book could correct this history of Lavoisier at the same time.  He was executed for involvement in a much-hated tax farming system, not from any hatred of science.  The various radicals continued the pro-science projects of the monarchy, but in this case they tragically put politics first.
  • Sexual Inequality Among Primates.  Compare relative sizes of male and female for primates, including our ape relatives.  For humans, the male to female ratio is typically from the top of head to ear.  Plenty of exceptions, but I read somewhere a study saying that when marriages were not arranged marriages, there were more couple who were near the ratio than if it were random.
  • How We Humans Overcame Our Ape Violence.   Or maybe The Ascent of Scented Women.  How female status improved as our ancestors became more human.  From the fossils we have, the gap in size between male and female is much less than in chimps, bonobos, or gorillas.  Males had less of an advantage being large.
    Then things got worse again when agriculture made war profitable.  Maybe fading with muscle power becoming less significant.
    Pre-humans must have found ways to control male violence.  Bonobos manage this by coalitions of females who beat up misbehaving males, but that depends on the males not being clever enough or self-disciplined enough to form a stronger male coalition against them.  And that, incidentally, is the fatal flaw in an ingenious short story by Ursula Le Guin, in which women all live alone and use men they favour to control or even kill young men who do not respect human choice.  Solitude, one of many entertaining stories in a collection called The Birthday of the World.  Typical of US feminists in resenting organised system of authority, but having no realistic notion of how to make them work for human benefit.
    In all human societies, most violence and in particular violence by groups is an overwhelmingly male matter.  And makes for unequal status for women, but still vastly better than for chimps.  It would be a useful educational exercise to ask women to imagine living like chimps – the strongest male can take you and any other sex must be secret.  Or worse, to live like lionesses, where at any time the boss male can be replaced by another boss male who will kill all your children so they can use you to make more.  There was another US female writer who imagined something like intelligent lions in the Chanur novels: but to keep these creatures at all sympathetic she had to soften their ways considerably.
  • Craftswomen at the Dawn of Humanity.  Experiments have been done to learn how well modern humans can manufacture stone tools.  Female researchers do it rather better.  They may have worked out it would be easier to carry pre-made tools rather than hunters making a fresh set, or bringing the carcass to a source of stone.
    Hunters are generally assumed to be male.  It is found in modern tribal societies, but we don’t know how it was done in ancient times.  Regardless, it is sensible to believe that joints small enough to carry would be brought back for everyone to work on.
  • Cooking Without Fire.  Offer small prizes to get some rural Africans to discover how much cooking they could do just with sunlight and other things that our remote ancestors would have had easy access to.  Get a nice documentary out of it. 
    Our ancestors might have cut meat into thin strips and hung it up to be ‘cooked’ without fire in the hot African sun.  Modern humans sometimes still do this, in preference to using flames. 
    Anyone who liked should be allowed to join in: DNA studies confirm that all modern humans are largely descended from a relatively late out-of-Africa branch of some much larger and larger-brained tool-making humans.

Topics in Technology

  • Radio – From Useless to Precious But Fascist. How Maxwell’s equations showed that light was electromagnetic radiation, and other wavelengths might exist. And how Heinrich Hertz used this theory to discover radio waves, as pure science and without and idea they were useful. And how it was not only Marconi who realised they might be useful. And how Marconi was entirely relaxed about Mussolini’s Fascism.
    The story could include a defence of pure science – no way to know what will be useful.
  • Were the Tech Billionaires Really Needed? 
    How all of them had luck, as well as talent and hard work.  There were several alternatives that were strong at one time, and then faded.
    It would be a nice exercise to check the fates of everyone who was in the same year studying maths at Harvard.  Who on the fact of it had similar talents, but I’d assume most had much less glorious fates. 
    I took another angle on this, based on someone else’s book on a related topic.  https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/labour-affairs-before-2014/business-success-a-mix-of-skill-and-luck/
    And more generally about ‘The Right Stuff’ – https://gwydionwilliams.com/about/998-from-labour-affairs/isolated-labour-affairs-pages-before-2015/does-the-right-stuff-exist/.
  • IBM’s Own Clone Wars.  The story of how IBM made its own personal computer and then lost control has been told, but I think something was left out.  They permitted others to make machines that would run their software, which lost them most of the market. 
    But was this as foolish as it now seems?
    As a computer programmer from the 1970s, I remember how clones of IBM mainframes existed, but had limited success.  The topic seems to have dropped out of popular memory, so it is open for someone to research and add to a general history.  My own knowledge is limited and I have other tasks.  But it would be a nice introduction to a popular book that would deal mostly with the IBM PC compatibles.
    For the personal computers, I think many younger people would be surprised at just how many flourishing alternatives there once were.
    Another indications that the Tech Billionaires are nothing like as clever or needed as they think themselves.
  • Internet Origins – How the Darkness Sometimes Giveth Life.  The internet had very dark origins.  Military research for how to survive after a nuclear war.  And then a boost for forums where people discussed sexual topics, which at that time had no easy forum.
    Note that there was no single pioneer, unlike Tim Berners-Lee making the World Wide Web possible.  Though a book should include the prehistory of hyperlink, a key concept and hard to implement.  No earlier clear pioneer, as far as I know.

Topics in Soviet History

Topics in Modern Chinese History

  • Chinese looking to improve Western views could arrange for the republication of some of the older books by sympathetic westerners about the Mao era:
    1) I stayed in China, by a Quaker missionary at an inland Chinese university, and who stayed on for a few years.  Long out of print.
    2)         Many items by Felix Green, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Greene#Books.   Notably A Curtain of Ignorance, which exposes the stories in circulation at the time.  No longer available except in libraries.  Interestingly different from the current crop of lies.
    3) A pamphlet about Tibet by a Sri Lankan Buddhist who viewed the Tibetan variety as degenerate and has something about corruption, I think.  I had it once. 1960s or 1970s,  but long gone.  Some pro-China group, Afro-Asian something-or-other.
  • The Planned Kuomintang Reconquest of China.  Document how Chiang Kaishek’s hope of retaking the Chinese mainland were made repeatedly, and the serious individuals in the West who believed. 
    Likewise Saigon thinking they might take back the North, which some of them had come from.
    Mao viewed this as a genuine threat in the 1950s, and it must have made him less tolerant of critics.  Taiwan was weak, but could have fronted for the USA, which did happen elsewhere.  Considered but not tried for Cuba.  But pro-Western Chinese seem unable to blame anyone except their own people.  Unable to think that the USA might have been cynically using them, which I said at the time about the Hong Kong protests.  (https://www.quora.com/q/pwgwxusqvnzzrlzm/Hong-Kong-Committing-Suicide.) 
    In this context, also note the complete absence of anyone in China taking advantage of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to be overtly anti-Mao.  Current dissidents claim to have been loyal at the time, as far as I know.
  • China’s Invisible Colour Revolution.  The Tiananmen Protests of 1989, seen in the West as spontaneous, are remarkably similar to the Colour Revolutions that they organised elsewhere.  Much more so than the collapse of Leninism in the Warsaw Pact countries, where most members of the Communist Parties had stopped believing.
    I definitely remember BBC expert commentary on BBC radio,  predicting that Communist Party rule would soon end.  Wan Li as Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress theoretically had the right to topple the existing system.  Someone must have records of everything the BBC was saying, and they could be usefully publicised.
    My own study might provide useful context: https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/42-china/42-1-chinese-politics/communist-chinas-1989-fight-for-survival/.
  • Western Hopes for China Fragmenting.  Serious Western sources predicting that Jiang Zemin would not keep control when Deng Xiaoping died in 1997.  Someone needs to check Western news archives for the period.
    I am reminded of the Chinese story about a farmer who sees a rabbit knock itself unconscious by hitting a post after fleeing a field in which other peasants and closing in on rabbits hiding there.  After taking this lucky find, he then wastes time coming back in the hope of finding another one.
  • The Dalai Lama’s Persistent Dishonesty.  How he pushed for an independent Tibet, then shifted ground.  Someone should check all of his books.  My memory is in one from the late 1960s or 1970s, he says something about Tibetans from the border regions who he found against him.  Maybe also he complains about Ethnic Tibetans whom he found committed to reform of Tibet itself, which he resisted.
    Also check his story about Mao supposedly saying to him “Religion is poison”.  He and Mao had no common language, so I was suspicious.  It was from the one meeting where he didn’t have his usual translator, so it was probably distorted or invented.
    I have posted details, https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/42-china/tibet/the-truth-about-the-dalai-lama/.
  • China’s Multi-Ethnic Military.  See if the Chinese Ministry of Defence could be persuaded to give figures about how many members there are of each ethnic group.  Or do their own account or English-language documentary.
  • 76 Years of False China Stories.  Someone could do a book that simply puts together all of the false statements made about Chinese Communist in English-language books. 
    It could even go before 1949.  Stories that the Chinese Communists were actually just bandits.  And other saying that Mao in the 1930s was dying of some incurable disease.  Plus the warlord who offered a reward for ‘Mr Soviet’ – is it real?
    Also Man’s Fate (La Condition Humaine) André Malraux’s inaccurate account of Shanghai 1927.  He doesn’t even know that the Chinese Communists never did assassinations.
    Others who called the Chinese of Mao’s ‘Blue Ants’, which I have covered, https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/china-blue-ants-and-dangerous-reds/.   The English translation of a French work, The blue ants: 600 million Chinese under the Red Flag. 1957 by Robert Guillain, which confirms how neat and secure China had become, but sees them as being robbed of individuality.   A lot of this might appeal to patriotic Chinese, maybe in Hong Kong.  Explaining from reputable Western sources just what’s wrong.

Maybe call it China’s Pen-Foes.  If that makes sense to you: the phrase is no longer fashionable with e-mail everywhere.

  • Hong Kong’s ‘Ghost Weddings’ – children who died as infants get a marriage ceremony at the age when their parents would be expected to see them married in Traditional China.  I saw it in a Hong Kong film, which shows the actual ghost, only the ghost-woman loved someone else.
    It seems to be a purely Hong Kong habit, and one that surprises other Chinese.
  • The Edgar Snow Conspiracy.  The full picture of Madam Sun Yat-sen arranging for Edgar Snow to visit Mao and write his famous Red Star Over China.  Maybe call it The Widow’s Revenge., because Chiang Kai-shek left her free to operate because she was his sister-in-law. 
    I did an article, https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/china-nurturing-red-stars/. 
    One thing I remember from Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s sycophantic biography that they wrote in 1986, before suddenly going anti-Mao and omitting their own work from their ‘Unknown Story’.  She was challenged ‘ if you were not Sun’s widow we would kill you’, to which she replied ‘if you were proper revolutionaries you would kill me anyway’.  A bold answer to men who killed many other political foes.
    It is possible that it was actually in the other English-language biography of Madam Sun.  I can’t find my notes of the matter

Topics in History – 16th to 19th century

  • Shrinking Europe.  The French achievement of reliable Longitude, based on observing the positions of the moons of Jupiter.  Using this ‘clock in the sky’, you could find out exactly where you were on Earth by comparing time by the sun with solar-system sun.
    This was more important than Longitude at Sea, which was a British story, and so gets more attention from English-speaking writers. 
    It was shown that Europe was significantly smaller than previous estimates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude#Government_initiatives.  Which led Louis 14th to comment that it had lost him more territory than and of his enemies.
    Incidentally, it was also tiny irregularities in the movements of Jupiter’s moons that led to the first accurate measure of the speed of light.  Caused by the variable distances between Jupiter and Earth.
  • The History and Adventures of an Atom by 18th-century novelist Tobias Smollett needs a readable version.  The novel satirises English politics during the Seven Years’ War, but disguises names by pretending it is set in ancient Japan.  For modern readers it makes little sense without the names, so these should be put in square brackets after the fictional name.  It would then be a useful popular history.
  • Irish Gaelic Protestants.  I’ve been told there was a small movement of Gaelic-speaking Protestants early on in Ireland, at a time when almost all of the older inhabitants spoke Gaelic.  Apparently the Catholic Church noticed the danger and managed to quash it: history might have been quite different otherwise.  Protestants in Ireland are mostly settlers from Scotland and England from the ‘Plan
    The topic interested me, because exactly that happened in Wales.  During the British Wars (‘English Civil War’) it was mostly Royalist and Roman Catholic.  But the Bible and other Protestant works were translated into Welsh, at a time when few ordinary Welsh people spoke English.  It became mostly Protestant and with many radicals linked to the English and Scottish left.
    I haven’t got a proper written source, but someone should look into this.  I could put a serious investigator in touch with people at Athol Books who could help.

Topics in History – Before the 16th century

  • Gobekli Tepe – was it made frightening, to be part of a ceremony initiating youths into young-male status?  Keep violence within acceptable limits. 
    Someone could get an interesting documentary by building a replica and sending young volunteers through it.  To be told nothing except it would be a test of courage.
  • Rome’s Undemocratic Republic.  Liberals nowadays tend to admire it and regret its failure.  But in its late stages it kept generating civil wars, and at all times it gave privileges to the rich and to older inhabitants.  I’ve written on this, https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Rome-s-Undemocratic-Republic.  But a lot more could be said.
    Colleen McCullough historic-novel series Masters of Rome is an interesting read, but idealises Julius Caesar and ignores the chances of something better emerging from the crisis.
  • Did Imperial China Fail to Discover Europe?  The Ming voyages, which were  China’s failed global imperialism. 
    What accounts there are do not give the context.  How the Ming failing to fully control Vietnam, and even had to let the ruler of Vietnam be the Chinese equivalent of Emperor rather than King.  And note that they were also facing a threat from Timur, who had conquered every other major neighbour, but died after just starting an conquering venture.  See Why The Ming Sea Voyages Led To Nothing. 
    They do mention Confucian hostility.  But this too is without context.  It is assumed that China was foolish and Europe wise.  But a suspicion that the new connections would change everything was entirely right.  Had the European ruling class foreseen the likely results of their own actions, they would not have allowed it.  But it was also a culture in chaos: see China: Why a sophisticated Empire could not modernise and The Left Redefined ‘The Normal’.
    Incidentally, I detail below my idea for an Alternate History in which Timur gets at least as far as what’s now Xinjiang.

Comic Topics – Things Someone Should Make

  • Civilisations are erected on top of acts of successful violence.  And will always produce things that could be seen as justifying that violence – but also perhaps not.
    History is always used in a partisan way.  People mostly think: “If it’s good I’ll take the credit.  If it’s bad, I’m not to blame”.  This could be a song, using the tune of the classic She Was Poor but She Was Honest.  I’m not up to it, but it is there for anyone interested.  Stripping history of its comfortable rightist myths.
  • A cartoon showing a Viking longship with the Soviet hammer-and-sickle, and someone says ‘that must be Eric the Red’.  There was an historic person of that name, but well before red had a political meaning.
    Mock silly self-indulgent US romance with a semi-clad female chorus line singing “for we really are so tender-hearted / there’s no knowing what we’d do if we should part.”  This was actually a dream my father had and told to us, though I don’t remember the specific drama that inspired it.
  • A cartoon set in a crowded venue where an unpopular character called Miss Greenpest starts saying there is a fire.  No one likes Miss Greenpest, and she can be silly.  Yes, there is a slight smell of smoke, but perhaps we have heavy smokers?
    Mr Serious says it is likely, but what does he know?
    The crowd refuse to listen to these unpopular characters.  But the fire is real, and many burn to death. 
    Those in the Upper Circles get away easily, but still say that things would definitely have been far worse if there had been some notion of regulation.  And even those who want regulation concentrate on saying how much they dislike Miss Greenpest.
    That seems to be how ‘action’ on Climate Change is working out. Protestors are mostly irritating and sometime silly.  But most of the warnings have been correct, at least from the 1990s when the science became clear.  Resistance is cultural and emotional rather than rational, which is why I invented Miss Greenpest as an analogy.  And more could be done, if anyone else has an inspiration.  She might fit nicely in a version of Greensleeves.  Maybe a cartoon series.
  • A cartoon version of the Statue of Liberty figure seated and injecting herself with a syringe based on the Empire State Building.
    I had this idea well before I saw some Chinese cartoons of an overweight version of Miss Liberty stuffing herself with a hamburger. 
  • A comic version of Frank Sinatra’s song I did it my way.  Including ‘I Did It My Way, / / you’ll do it my way’, which was his actual attitude.  And quite common in the USA, getting worse under Trump.
  • We will fight them on the beaches – Seaside Comic Postcard style for Britian and Nazi leaders fighting.  An old style of vulgar art.
  • Comic fragment, use somewhere.  To fall like Lucifer, never to rise again.  Or maybe to fall like Lucille Ball, maybe to bounce right back.  The thing with Lucifer is from a play about Henry 8th, credited to Shakespeare but it’s doubted if he wrote much of it.
  • The Wagneritis Syndrome.  Try taking seriously Richard Dawkins’s idea of our intelligence being unreal and we are moved passively by memes.  Have this happen in a modern British suburban  family.
    Opening, “I just don’t have much of a musical ear: I couldn’t tell Mozart from Wagner.  The music shifts from one to the other.  Then, Mozartian,
    ‘But these musical memes have a way to infect / And now I am plagued by a duo.
    Miss Greenpest keeps rising from the depths.
    Man arrives with briefcase and bowler hat, but carrying a spear:
    Hi there my sunshine, I’ve got Wagneritis
    Wife, ‘is it infectious>
    ‘Very much so’
    Both together, ‘Woe woe woe woe!’  Then joined by Mr Thunder from next door, wielding a portable lawnmower like a hammer and making loud bangs.
    Side issues.  Valkyrie theme, Please do not ride my Valkyrie, t-shirt they put over armour.  Wotan Seafood Supplies.  Kippers for breakfast, kippers for dinner, kippers for supper, kippers for tea!
  • Gobekli Tepe – a comic speculation.  Begin with a professorial type stepping from behind one of the pillars at Gebeke Tepe and say “but is it civilisation”, in the style of Kenneth Clarke. 
    My idea is that it was actually a ritual centre.  Designed to spook teenage males at a coming-of-age ceremony.
    Get some teenage volunteers, offered a nice fee for something designed to scare, but not told details.  See if they could be really spooked.
  • Elusive Butterfly.  Based on the charming 1965 song, but it definitely has undertones of sexual harassment.  So have a reply from the butterfly herself.  ‘I’ve got good reason to be elusive.  Is this the right male to fertilise my eggs?  I doubt he does the displays I expect, and actually getting his sperm inside my body might be awkward.’  (They do a dance and link abdomen to abdomen.)
  • Comic Tolkienian Songs. 
    To the tune of the comic song ‘Simon Smith and His Dancing Bear’ (which actually has bitter Dixieland undertones that most people miss). 
    ‘Mordor moments with some refinements / Like eating people with knives and forks
    ‘Burn and slaughter and kill your daughter / It’s Barad-dûr and its loathsome orcs’    .
    To the tune of the Australian series Neighbours:
    ‘Nazgul, everybody hates the Nazgul / Even Uruks loath the Nazgul / Next door is only a sword-thrust away / ‘Nazgul, everybody hates the Nazgul / That’s why the Nazgul are such grim fiends.’
    It’s a sad fact that it’s easier to be comic about evil people than good people.

Film and TV – Things Someone Should Make – Science Fiction / Fantasy

  • Andromeda Nebula and other 1960s Soviet SF could be dramatised.  I’d ignore the later stuff, which mostly reflect Late-Soviet confusion.  The best have been done already.
  • The Currents of Space.  By Isaac Asimove, and set in the same Future History as Foundation, but much earlier.  Trantor is a rising power, but Planet Sark is a rival.  They exploit the Florians, with the extra twist that Florians are  pale, maybe Nordic or Celtic.  The Sarks maybe as Latino.  A racial mix for Trantorians, and for foreign visitors, who would have distinctive clothing unlike Stark styles.  The ambassador to be definitely African-American, which is what Asimov specified.  Saying ‘negro’ in one of his comments on his own work, at a time when the word was seen as neutral and acceptable. 
    The physics is ingenious but wrong.  Make it something else that is speculative but not definitely wrong, such as cosmic dust that emits muons.  Muons do boost nuclear reactions: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion. 
  • Pebble in the Sky.  Also in the same Future History as Foundation.  The Empire is strong and the inhabitants of a slightly radioactive Earth are discriminated against.  A very ordinary Jewish tailor gets transported into this future and gains special powers.  It deals indirectly with Jewish themes, in a way that impressed me.
    Currents and Pebbles are two in a Galactic Empire series, along with The Stars Like Dust.  But that one impressed me much less.  Likewise his early robot stuff, though they are better than a lot that does get made.
    The Stars Like Dust includes someone finding an ancient copy of the US Constitution, supposedly the answer to everything.  I thought it silly at the time, and later learned that Asimov had been pushed to include it in the magazine series.  And kept it for the book version when others approved.
    This historic basis is the way Moscow managed to rise to power after all Russia was conquered by the Mongols.  Someone might want to boost it on that basis.
  • The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson.   A human raised by elves.  Based on Norse mythology: but these aren’t Tolkien’s elves.  Elegant, but not moral.  Slave-owners, rapists, and kidnappers of human children.  But their main foes, the trolls, are far worse.
    There are two versions.  He rewrote it, but many people including myself rate the first version as better.  It has the devil as real and part of the power game, whereas the revised version makes it Odin in disguise.
  • Hrolf Kraki’s Saga: a nice adaptation by Poul Anderson of a saga about a Danish king. 
  • Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson.  A soldier from World War Two finds himself a hero in a world with magic creatures
  • The Butterfly Murders.  An existing film, unavailable in the UK.  It could also get a remake, but I liked the original.

Film and TV – Things Someone Should Make – Historic / Alternate History

  • The Borderers, showing an ordinary family on the English-Scottish border when Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots made dangerous politics.  Showing Border Feuds, real-life adventures.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borderers.  
  • Real World Germ Warfare.    Japan’s Unit 731.  Imagine someone escapes from.  And then the Korean War allegations – imagine that the Japanese  refuse to get involved.
    Some victims were Russian.  Since there was no war between Japan and Russia till nearly the end, these must have been White Russians.  There must be some stories, probably not in English.
  • General Longstreet, Convert from Racism.  Considered Number Two among Confederate generals  after the death of Stonewall Jackson.  But cast out of the Confederate pantheon for working with Reconstruction. 
    This happened because he moved to New Orleans, and was impressed by the African-American community there, which had always been less unequal than the rest of the South.
    Show his change of view, with flashbacks to the war.
  • The Seven Months War of 1914.  My own short story about an Alternative Great War where Lloyd George has not survived the Marconi Scandal, and managed to shorted the war by building on the historic Christmas Truce.  https://gwydionmadawc.com/060-my-own-science-fiction/the-seven-months-war-of-1914-part-one/. 
  • The Other Capone.  The life of Lousi Capone, not related to Al Capone: the name is common in Italy.  This man was a part of Murder Incorporated, executed 1941.
    A good secondary character is another gangster I read about, but I forget the name.  Kept a restaurant and also sang opera songs, quite well.
  • Mack the Knife.  Revive Brecht’s comic opera, which is currently not available to the general public.
  • Yangtze Incidents.  The Amethyst story, a British warship on a Chinese river.  Start with a Chinese man who was on board.  Seeing the British film about it in Hong Kong, and upset to find his part is small.  A pro-Communist relative says he should have expected it, and follows with a history of Western intervention and violence along the Yangtze.  Maybe done as a mix of cartoon and live action.
  • Norse Myths, As Told.  A rich Muslim in Muslim Spain collects mythology.  The historic Ragnar Lodbrok (hairy-breeches) delivers.  ‘There was an old man, but he’d died of old age.  But taught his wife, and I have her daughter who also knows some.’
    She takes the line of Saxo Grammaticus – these were magicians who tricked men.  But I will tell you the tale the poets believe.
    Show as per Elder Edda, not softening.  Including less popular, like Thor tricking a dwarf in a riddle-game and sunlight kills him, the presumed basis for Gandalf and the Trolls in The Hobbit.  And she could recite the poem that has Gandalf, Bombur, etc.  And another where Odin and Thor do blessings and curses, suggesting a basic rivalry.  And along with the standard tale of Baldur, the much less romantic version from Saxo Grammaticus.
  • Timur at the Gates of China.   Historically, he died at the start of a venture to conquer China, which was then abandoned.  For this story, there is a failed poisoning.  Involved was a man also knows of a Moroccan ship that touched the New World but failed to rouse interest.  He had thought of taking it to Timur, but was repelled by the man putting the Ottoman Emperor in a cage, and making his Serbian Christian wife serve Timur food while naked,  (Real stories, though disputed.)
    Gold was taken but he got some fine pottery.  Chinese experts say this is indeed unknown.  An admiral gets guides from Pacific islanders, who know vaguely of South America.  (This too is a disputed claim.)
    The climax would be an attack by Timur’s forces on the powerful fort at Jiayuguan Pass.  But the venturer who fled Timur throws a gold idol to a chief he knows to dislike Timur.  ‘This is the new wealth of the Chinese Emperor.
    As an extra – the 2nd Ming Emperor is present, in hiding and not wanting more civil war.
    Also from the New World, descendants of an African ruler Mansa Abubakari II, a highly disputed claim.  Makes a good story and would play well in Africa.
  • City On The Edge Of Forever.  A remake of this famous episode could close a plot hole: why they didn’t explain who they were? Tell Edith that her well-meant venture into politics will be disastrous. Tell her to stick to personal charity, assuming that this will be safe.
    It’s a character error that this does not occur to them. Breaking Prime Directive, but Kirk did that, and it was anyway not part of the backstory at the time.  But of course it would have undermined the drama.
    It then occurred to me that someone could do a remake. The adult Wesley Crusher visits Captain Kirk.  You are about to visit the past, and realise that one of your crew ruin history by saving the life of a women whose well-meaning work will cause a disastrous change in history.  Mr Spock realises this and says she must be allowed to die.  But you realise there is a third option – show them the unwanted result and persuade her to not launch a pacifist movement. 
    He shows Kirk that entire line of history.  They explain it all to Edith Keeler.  She is still uncertain until McCoy manifests: she then accepts it.  Satisfied, they return – but are arrested by unfamiliar humans keeping watch on the “Guardian of Forever”.  Something similar to the ‘Confederation of Earth’ that a future captain will deal with: 2nd episode of Star Trek: Picard.  Edith avoids pacifism, but still changes something critical.  She becomes friends with Elanor Roosevelt, then defends a woman in a sensational divorce case to deny her alimony because of an apparent lesbian relationship.  President Roosevelt’s foes use this to expose that his own marriage has lapsed, and suspicion about her female friends.
    Kirt asks ‘was it’, and is told that it is irrelevant.  Edith Keeler seems doomed to cause some disaster.  Roosevelt does not seek a second term.  The replacement keeps New Deal, but wants no war in Europe.  He does not send aid to Britain after the Fall of France, so Hitler does not declare war on the USA after Pearl Harbour.  Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union then gets bogged down: his generals assassinate him and make a compromise peace with Stalin, going back to the borders as they existed in 1941.
    Kirk accepts.  He does not mention consulting the woman.  Still stops McCoy.  Returns, but there is a slight change. Maybe someone they know vanishes.  Maybe a successful romantic relationship that Spock had, and she is gone.  He records it in a private message to his mother.
    The trip could also include them meeting the young Isaac Asimov. Ten years old in 1930. He spoke Yiddish as well as English, and it would be a nice extra to have Spock know it.  Speaks it to get trust to find a good electronics place.  And warn young Asimov not to get run over. And on his return finds an extra story by Asimov with a clear reference, and then some extras.
  • Little Boy Death.  Start with people in Hiroshima – Korean workers and Japanese women who dislike the war. 
    See something fall from an aircraft.  “It must be spying”.  Making notes to report and please the authorities without harming anyone.  But of course it is the atom bomb, which was an air burst.
    Have the child whose uniform is on display, and the man who becomes a shadow.
    Thread it in with an extra set of spies at Los Alamos who never get caught.

Ideas for Science Fiction – Studies

  • Soviet Futures – Worlds that Never Happened.  A factual book documenting all of the things SF got wrong, as well as the successes.  And checking which successes were simply putting into fiction a think that scientists and technologists were already working on. 
    Plus some political speculations.  In an earlier section, I explained how the goal of Leninism was always a socialist World State.  And that before the collapse, there were a few SF novels that imagined the Soviets winning a military victory.  The early works of Robert E. Heinlein have this. 
    Another possible outcome was a convergence.  This was widely expected in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Soviet Union was still strong.  You find a few cases in SF.  Or it might have been a permanent division. 
    Someone could write a good book collecting and comparing the various imagined Science Fiction futures that speak of a Cold War ending.  Not something I want to do myself: I am nearly 75 and have other tasks.

Ideas for Science Fiction –New Fiction

  • Aliens revive the woman of Jewish origins who helped assassinate Tsar Alexander 2, and does she like the result?  This would need knowledge of Russian culture that I don’t have.
  • Jack London who has lived into the 1930s meets Kafka who has emigrated to the USA.

Ideas for Historic Fiction

  • Those Shakespear Rewrites.  Marlow’s death was faked.  He has been working as a spy in Continental Europe, but sending plays that were attributed to Shakespeare, whose style was similar.  Aged 60, he gets the Complete Works and is outraged at all the changes Shakespeare made.  His errors of facts.  And is not impressed by the female characters who are now cherished..
  • King Alfred the Bad.  Historic novel with Alfred as villain?  Going further than Alfred Dugan’s The King of Athelney, which has him fine except for setting aside a nephew who might have had a better claim.
    Use the raw facts in Aelfred’s Britain: War and Peace in the Viking Age, by Max Adams.
    Alfred as poisoner.  Norse anyway converting: Saint Edmund.  Note how the grandchildren failed.  Also the very convenient death of Sigtryggr of York.
  • The 1066 Conspiracy.  The Church, which gave William of Normandy his Papal Banner, was also well-informed about both King Harold’s large army and the plans of Harold Hardrada.  Clerics conspire to have him delay for supposed dangerous weather until the best time to sail.
  • Iron-Headed Old Rat.  The real and squalid history of William Jardine, fictionalised as heroic in Noble House by James Clavell.  The name comes from a Chinese women
  • Russians From Africa.  Puskin’s great-grandfather Abram Petrovich Gannibal was pure Black African.  Through favour from  Peter the Great he rose high in Russia’s aristocracy, and had successively two noble-born white wives.  Someone should do a novel about him.  Even a film.
  • Red Panther – He Long: Ho Long in older books.  A Chinese Red Army general who was individually heroic.  Ought to appeal to a Western audience, particularly he did in 1969 as a victim of the Cultural Revolution.
  • The Other Slave Trade.  Set in the 18th century.  A visitor from British America redeems a Slavonic slave in the Ottoman Empire.  Notes the fertility of what became South Russia.  But meantime Black Africans are working on his estate.
  • The Lady Who Built the Jerusalem Temple.  Credit Jezabel’s daughter, who married the King of Judea.  Was regarded as evil by later
     builds the Jerusalem Temple.  Link to Dido and Carthage.
  • Babbit 2021.  Contrast a modern business person to the 1930s fiction.  Ashli Babbitt, and the ghost of the original Babbit keeps appearing and being shocked. 
  • The Prospect of Tsarist Murder.  Invent a debate among the regional Bolsheviks.  False names, since probably little is known.  They debate killing the Tsar and his family.
    “I’d happily shoot the old man.  But the lad?”
    “Think of Lenin’s brother.  Think of Bloody Sunday.  His clear guilt over Black Hundred massacred in Ukraine?”
    “But the young women?  I liked to imagine those Grand Duchesses becoming the wives of honest proletarians.  Or something in their own right?  Look at Kollontai?  Have Kollontai adopt one?”
    “A lovely dream, but we could lose control any time.  The boy is likely to die anyway.  One of dozens of ruthless princes in foreign countries becomes an heir.  People might rally to such a bastard.”
    “We didn’t expect it to be like that, when we overthrew Kerenski “
    “We didn’t start the mass killing.  We didn’t start the immense slaughter of the World War.  Serbs started that by shooting a well-meaning Archduke.  The British Imperialists talk of ‘Gallant Little Serbia’, even though the Serbs who run their Secret Service and probably set up the killing of the Archduke undeniably killed their former monarch.”
    “That’s Imperialism.  One day, those same Serbs may be re-cast as villains by the British Empire.  Any suggestion of uniting Bosnia-Herzegovina with Serbia might be seen as wicked.  Look at the way the British ‘jingoes’ saw the Tsar’s Russia as their best friend.  The song was written against him, and they were firm ‘Russia shall not have Constantinople’.  Then they tried to win it for them at Gallipoli.”
    “Sending in Australians who were new to the war.  They couldn’t spare anyone from their futile efforts to break though German lines in the Battle of the Somme.”
    The two debaters are left weeping, older man says “I’m hardened, I’ll see to it.  And cause no more pain than I must.  Then we bury them, but I’ll move away a couple of the bodies, just to confuse anyone.”
    End with it being reported to Lenin, who notes and them moves on to other matters.  
  • Rob Roy’s Ruthless Son.  There is a current fashion for romanticising criminals.  I shared it at one time, but now think otherwise.  It helped when I found out that Robin Hood and his men are ruthless thugs in the very first stories about them.  And learned that Rob Roy was at times an informer for the Hanoverian government against the Jacobite rebels he worked with: then-secret but long-preserved government records document this.  I also found myself wondering if his remarkable escapes and survival into old age was because he was quietly using his inside knowledge to betray other criminals, meaning that the authorities wanted him to stay free.
    There is a reliable record of one of Rob Roy’s sons kidnapped an heiress to try to get control of her fortune.  This shocked her so much she died young.  From the little we know, I suspect his other sons were also revolting, which says something about the man himself.
    Someone bold and with a knowledge of the Scottish Highlands could do a debunking novel.  One would make him as much of a villain and cheat as I figure he was.  And link it to his sons, since a modern audience would have to view the abductor as abominable.