Cleaning Out The Sci-Fi Idea File

I came upon a file in my cabinet marked "Sci Fi Research." Since I've been keeping ideas for a nonapocalyptic future story on my new computer journal, I decided to go through the file, see what I could find that would apply, and get rid of the rest.

So far, I've found an editorial from 1995 about welfare reform. I can see where I was going with that, but I think it's too old to do me any any good. Get this--I saved an undated article about personal home pages. A-yeah, that's futuristic. There's also a 1995 article about Biosphere 2. Old news and the kind of claustrophobic, enclosed setting that would make me nuts to have to write about.

There's close to an inch of this kind of stuff, including a page I tore out of Newsweek regarding the 1950s and a Milestones from Time in 1992 announcing the deaths of Sam Kinison, Isaac Asimov, and Sam Walton. Nowadays what would interest me workwise is the bit about Molly Picon's passing, because today she is the least well-known person who died that issue. Time was a big source of information for me back in the '90s. Was I interested in the fact that back in '92 they thought that maybe high-fat, low-fiber diets didn't cause breast cancer, that someone was working on a vaccine from patients' own cells to treat some kind of lymphoma, or that frozen water was found on Mercury? All those stories were on another page I saved.

I have a review of a book about Daniel Boone in that sci-fi file. I don't know why I kept it, but it's still in print. I also found a review of a book about Jackie Gleason with "Sci-fi" written in my handwriting next to his picture. That book does not appear to still be in print.

This is going to be a much, much bigger job than I thought it would be, and not at all worth it, since I'm nowhere near ready to get started on a book like this. So I'll just close it up and put it away for another couple of decades.

Oh and there is also a two-page outline regarding a space station story for adults in which everyone on the space station is bored out of their minds. While there is an aspect of that that still interests me, no, I am not doing any stinkin' space station stories.

This was typed on the back of some of my old resumes. I really, really don't want anyone to find those.