Foiled by Futurama

As you can see over the last few days, I've shown that a great idea I had, that of building a dome over Houston, was crushed because of other people who thought of similar things. Well, they thought of it after me but made their ideas public before me.

Every author thinks he has a new idea or take on a subject. When it comes to science fiction in general, or Rome's Revolution specifically, there should be plenty of new ideas. I discoursed about this in an earlier post and even mentioned the fact that A. E. Van Vogt wrote a story called "Far Centaurus" which at its most elemental level is exactly the same premise as Rome's Revolution. Of course that is all it is. Everything else is different.

I only mentioned Futurama in passing last time but for all three of you who do not know it, Futurama is about a guy from the present who is frozen and sleeps for a thousand years and wakes up in a strange new world. (Sound familiar?) What I did not mention was a specific Futurama episode entitled A Clockwork Origin. In this episode, first aired on August 12, 2010, Professor Farnsworth introduces nanobots into the environment of a lifeless world and the nanobots rapidly begin evolving into mechanical organisms including mechanical dinosaurs.



Dammit. That's pretty much my whole mutation scene from Rome's Revolution when the VIRUS units began to evolve. I even had a VIRUS dinosaur named Lawlidon in the original long-form version of Rome's Revolution. I wrote the first draft of the stupid thing in 1973, 37 years before that show was aired but I didn't publish it until November 28, 2011.

I hope nobody accuses me of copying. Otherwise, I'll have to post the original typescript online, just like Stephen King did for Under the Dome. If you can just hang in there, I'll publish the original story, entitled VIRUS 5, hand-typed from the original manuscript in The Vuduri Companion which will be out after I finish The Milk Run.