Is this Sci-Fi? Anyone else doing NaNoWriMo?

AnyaKimlin

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I'm almost certain it is, but I'm not a huge sci-fi fan. I have been known to read the odd one or two and devoured John Christopher as a kid. This is just a NaNoWriMo project that I'm not even planning to make the 50K with so I guess the genre isn't terribly important beyond I don't want to wander onto the wrong forum there. I've been comfortably in detective fiction, fantasy and historical before where I knew enough not to be pilloried. I am sure the story is very clichéd, improbable and dull but I just want something light as my sit-com pilot deadline is sometime in December. However - Help:

Anyway I have a group of kids in a post-apocalyptic world. They live in a slum in a toxic desert just off the rubbish dump of a climate controlled dome. The society lives mostly off the dump. The main character is Pich (name is seriously subject to change) who is the daughter of the creator, a woman revered by everyone else and the closest their society has to a leader.

Periodically, a troop train stops. Troops get off and round up some of the inhabitants of the town and they are never seen again. After the troops have left ailing people are found on the dump Due to my usual lack of planning I have this vague idea that Pich's mother is in the hire of the hated people in the dome who throw out ailing people and she fixes them up as cyborg, wipe their memory and then they are recollected.

One of the roundups sees Pich's mother taken and she is left in charge. She knows how to heal others like her but she can't help the people thrown on the heap. At some point I think she will leave to investigate.
 
Thanks it felt similar enough to John Christopher's Guardians to be sci-fi. I'm not expecting to get close to 50,000 this year with other deadlines but decided I could start ...
 
I like the idea of healthy people being rounded up and then ill people appearing on the dump. That smacks of big mystery :).

As for the name Pich, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, so in conjunction with what you've sketched out, my brain substituted the word Pique as the sound of it! Which of course means arouse interest/curiosity, or irritated/resentful. Could describe your main character's state. Funny how the mind works!
 
Living in a post-apocalyptic dome has to be sci-fi, regardless of anything else, surely?

My NaNo will be entirely set inside my pocket universe, and will feature a trans-universal chase sequence which may reoccur at several points.
Yep, I'm winging it, with minimal planning.
 
I like the idea of healthy people being rounded up and then ill people appearing on the dump. That smacks of big mystery :).

At present it's a mystery to me as well ;) This story has been knocking around for a few years so I have developed the world itself fairly well.

As for the name Pich, I'm not sure how to pronounce it, so in conjunction with what you've sketched out, my brain substituted the word Pique as the sound of it! Which of course means arouse interest/curiosity, or irritated/resentful. Could describe your main character's state. Funny how the mind works!

I imagined Pick or Pitch but it doesn't really matter I like Pique. She was originally a boy called Bobby and then I called her Puck after the woman on Crimes of Passion (Swedish crime drama) but figured as it has a potential YA angle it probably wasn't the best name choice.

Living in a post-apocalyptic dome has to be sci-fi, regardless of anything else, surely?

Unsure. I wondered if there was a low magic post apocalyptic fantasy world. My urban fantasy has a similar dystopian fairy realm and I think it is squarely fantasy.

[/quote]My NaNo will be entirely set inside my pocket universe, and will feature a trans-universal chase sequence which may reoccur at several points.
Yep, I'm winging it, with minimal planning.[/QUOTE]

So am I - I just have a good part of it worked out because its been one I keep meaning to write. Is a trans-universal chase sequence what it sounds like? A chase across several universes?
 

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