Tell me if this a decent idea for a novel, it's a sort of noir.
In the future, just about everyone is a designer baby, generally chosen by a single parent. Relationships exist but are invariably open. The only people who still have children through sex are the Orthodox Church, who now are so small and isolated that they are seen as an ethnicity. A woman in the Church, but drifting more and more away from it in personal isolation (lacking acceptance from the outside world) falls in love with a guy outside of it (of course it's unrequited because he looks like a movie star and compared to everyone else, all the Orthodox look ugly as hell); she becomes so obsessed she starts stalking him and planting bugs in his apartment and all sorts of things (she's occupationally a private detective and knows how to do all that); one day, though, he is murdered in what appears to be a hate crime by someone from her Church, but she realizes that it was someone who was stalking her, and now there is a very good chance she will be implicated because she left all kinds of equipment around his house, including one-way mirrors with cameras and stuff. So she has to sort out exactly what is going on, and the story goes through a lot of theological allegory and things like that, exploring the protagonist's ambivalent attitude toward God and intense feeling of alienation.
Would it work?
>>7491300
hm. i wouldnt read it personally, but i'm sure someone would. sounds a bit like PKD but with more JAAAAYsus
>>7491300
Sounds like a ripoff of Gattaca.
>>7491319
I guess in the same sense as Back to the Future is a rip off of H.G. Wells.
>>7491515
So a complete, 100% ripoff. Gotcha.
>>7491536
Well, no, not at all. There's a similar device, but designer babies are hardly some special concept that Gataca came up with. They play a massive role in Brave New World, and in fact are clearly an obvious future because sperm donation is already vetted by preferences.
My principle inspiration isn't Gataca, but the Dialect of Sex vs. conservative religious values.
>>7491549
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dialectic_of_Sex
>>7491300
go read welcome to the monkey house by vonnegut.
>>7491553
>Firestone hesitates to make exact predictions about how children will be raised once they are no longer born of women in the biological family, but suggests that there will be a variety of child-rearing social units, including couples "living together" and households of unrelated persons, up to a dozen or so, who contract to remain together long enough to provide a home for their children until the latter are ready to enter the world, which they will do at a much earlier age than is now considered possible.[1]
In the sort of future when humans don't even give birth to kids (which is what is the case in the novel), I think designer babies are a given.
>>7491300
I like it, but it does have some Gattaca feel. Do it, and keep as far from Gattaca as you can. I'd read it.
>>7491568
In what ways is it like Gattaca? Humans still give birth in Gataca, Gataca is about a natural sibling made obsolete by his designer sibling, and striving to compete in a designer world.
This about an entirely natural community in a world where birth itself is obsolete everywhere else, and a woman with pretty much no ambition who gets obsessed with someone.
It's,,,,not at all comparable, except there is a contrast between the natural and the engineered, but that contrast is not a key point of the plot so much as the contrasting philosophies are.
>>7491300
So... Gattaca?
>>7491584
How so?
>>7491300
I'd read it.
The world building might end up being a tall order, though.
>>7491591
There will be no world building. The only focus will be on the Orthodox community the protagonist lives in, and city she drives to everyday for work and her object of obsession lives in.
I'm not a fan of worldbuilding in general, Tolkein excepted.
Will this be in a alternate history world (you know, with countries like the USA and China still there but some political changes) or will it be completely different (you know, like the Hunger Games world)?
>>7491660
The story is going to be about the protagonist and the philosophical, theological and moral issues. Things like history and politics won't play a part.
Interesting premise. Execution however is more important than the idea.
>>7491780
True.
