Beaten To The Finish Line

Because Science Fiction is, as Kris Straub describes it in the foreword to Jump Leads Volume 1, a “thousand-limbed, vein-husked blood sac, its million hearts pumping away,” it’s all too easy to come up with an idea that someone else has already thought of. There is simply far too much scifi out there for one man to reasonably sit down and process all by himself and no matter how hard you try to avoid it you will invariably wind up doing something that’s already been done before.

Interestingly enough, however, I’ve experienced this in the reverse. There have so far been two occasions where I’ve come up with an idea for Jump Leads that has later been developed somewhere else – Doctor Who, one of the shows that inspired Jump Leads’ creation in the first place…

The original draft of Issue #2, “It Came From Space!“, was originally a lot more… well, boring. The Flurry arrives on a dilapidated space station. The power is failing, the hull is buckling, and to make matters worse the entire station is beginning a slow descent into a sun. The episode revolved entirely around Meaney deciding he’s capable of saving the station, coordinating with the crew (Anderson, Lloyd and Tudyk) to try and save it. They fail, and the station plummets into the sun only to discover that it’s not a sun at all – it’s a wormhole.

I didn’t enjoy writing this version of the story, to be honest. The threat didn’t seem tangible enough to work and the ending was lazy and uninteresting. So, at the end of 2006, I scrapped this version (originally called “Pressure Cooker”, and later “Here Comes The Sun”) and began working on what would become the story as you’ve (hopefully) read it. Six months later, the BBC airs an episode of Doctor Who called “42“, in which the TARDIS arrives on a spaceship which is making a slow descent into a sun. Also of interest is the film “Sunshine“, which came out the same year.

There was another Jump Leads story which I started writing in 2007 but later abandoned (although I like the idea, so I may come back to it). Meaney and Llewellyn arrive at the Library, a Lead facility containing books from every corner of the Multiverse. If a book existed somewhere in the infinite span of reality, it could be found there (rather like the Discworld’s L-Space, only much more physical). Strangely, despite the gargantuan size of the Library, it’s suspiciously empty. The facility has been long-abandoned, and is now home to a race of jaguar/gorilla hybrid creatures who prey upon whatever they can find there.

It was an interesting idea but I felt that I’d already done the “running away from a monster” idea in ICFS!, and what’s more I’d done it better than I planned to here. Just as well really, because the idea of a ruddy great big library infested with strange, carnivorous creatures would pop up in the brilliant Doctor Who series four two-parter, “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead“. It was much better-executed, too. Gotta love Steven Moffat.

This sort of thing happens in scifi all the time. Any number of scifi serials have done the “mysterious clone of principle character” storyline, for instance, with recent webcomic examples being Starslip and Good Ship Chronicles. It just goes to show you that no matter how great you think your idea is, someone has likely already beaten you to it.