we are still innocent

[impersona]

So I was at Z's journal and watched the Carl Sagan autotune vid she linked, and was struck at how many good fic-able prompts there were in the man's language.  I hope I'm not seeming to trivialize or make trite his work, but a lot of these are really invocative and compelling, and I wanted to keep a list of them somewhere in case I need a prompt pool to draw from in the future.  A few of them seemed really good for Kingdom, particularly for inspiring Geld-era stories ("Testing the structure and consistency of the world", "If we do not destroy ourselves", and "Of exquisite interrelationships of the awesome machinery of nature").  Some of them pinged me for Perfect World and Arcadia as well.

My text is being funky.  Sorry I am too lazy to fix it now.

• I'm not very good at singing songs
  
  
• If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

• Some when-else in time

• We will one day venture to the stars

• A still more glorious dawn awaits

• The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
  
• Of exquisite interrelationships of the awesome machinery of nature

• In which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky

• Testing the structure and consistency of the world

• Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise

• The sky calls to us

• If we do not destroy ourselves

• Full of strange sounding ideas

• When we are in fact visiting other worlds

• A morning filled with 400 billion suns

• The rising of the milky way

• The shore of the cosmic ocean

If you have any more prompts to suggest, or places where I can find good prompts, please drop me a comment!

Comments

[thez]

Well for starters, the other Symphony of Science vids! This one in particular (it's my favorite after "A Glorious Dawn"). "We live in an in-between universe" makes me think of Perfect World, and "We've traveled this way before, and there is much to be learned" definitely makes me think of Kingdom!

[nanners]

My favourite Sagan quote, hands down: "The cosmos is also within us; we are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."

[sporky_rat]

I like the B5 version of that quote better.
'We are star stuff. We are the universe made manifest trying to figure itself out.'.

[ru]

LOOOOOOVE for SoS. <3. I'm also glad to know that I'm not the only one that thinks A Glorious Dawn is epically poetic. I think "Our Place in the Cosmos" and "A Wave of Reason" are also rife with promptables. I'll post some of the ones that particularly strike me tonight, but I'll point out that now that you've got me thinking of SoS for prompt mining, "The real world as it actually is is not evil; it's remarkable" is totally the basis for an Alice ficlet.

ALSO, YAY PERFECT WORLD. <3. Tonight I will try to catch up on it, as I've been sorely neglecting Haruka. I should stop that. She will glare at me otherwise.

[ru]

OKAY HERE ARE A FEW MORE:

From "A Wave of Reason":

--If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to be skeptical of authority, then we're up for grabs

--Teach a man to reason and he'll think for a lifetime

--Special stories

--Look at what's out there, it isn't in proportion

--Never let yourself be diverted by what you wish to believe

--Make sure that there's a clear sharp line drawn on the floor - to do otherwise is to embrace madness

And "Our Place in the Cosmos"

--What is our place in the cosmic perspective of life?

--Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp?

--Are there things about the universe that are ungraspable?

--We are children equally of the earth and the sky

--Dangerous evolutionary baggage

--We could be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation and we wouldn't even know

--Star stuff contemplating the stars

YAY PROMPTS. :D

[impersona]

MY FAVORITES:

--We are children equally of the earth and the sky

--Dangerous evolutionary baggage

--Star stuff contemplating the stars

OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

Also OMG for Perfect World! I hope we can work out some plot for that game!

[ru]

YES MOST DEFINITELY SOME PLOTTING WOULD BE AWESOME. <3 Maybe Haruka's little sis drags her towards street performances because she thinks they are COOL, or something. If nothing else, maybe we can somehow exploit the whole previous-life-student/wife-of-student's-master-who-occasionally-had-to-put-master-in-his-place-YOU'D-BETTER-NOT-FOLLOW-IN-HIS-FOOTSTEPS-BOY thing. XD