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Has it Been Done Before?

14:22 / 19.02.04

[This might be a Creation thread. I'll leave it to the mods to decide]

How many times have you thought that you'd come up with an original idea, only for someone with a big nose and glasses to say, with a sniff: "Actually, that was first done by Lem Stalingrad in a short story entitled 'The Bannister of the Gods' that he wrote for Amazing Stories in 1932, actually," the very first time you got it out in public?

Use this thread to prevent that sort of thing, or at least prepare yourself for it. Think of it as a safe, plain brown environment in which to ask friendly, knowledgable people if they've seen, heard or read of your idea - or similar - somewhere before.

First up:

- has anyone ever written a story along the lines of Kafka's 'The Trial' in which someone is given a job, but they have no idea what it is, not even after they have been doing it for several months? The nearest example I can think of is that episode of Spaced.

16:59 / 19.02.04

It makes me think a bit of that big rant in the film Cube about how the whole thing could have been created by loads of different people who all did their little bit of the work without asking any questions about what it was for, and so whatever the original idea was got lost somewhere along the line and they just ended up making this.. huge illogical thing.. with everybody following somebody else's instructions and nobody taking overall responsibility for its creation..

Not the same exactly, but kind of a similar theme..

Actually I think your idea owes quite a lot to the reality of modern day employment. I have no idea what a lot of people do for a living even after they've explained it to me several times. And I'm sure I could actually do their jobs and still be none the wiser..

17:50 / 19.02.04

I don't know about written stories per se, but I think this idea showed up a couple of times in "Seinfeld".

18:36 / 19.02.04

It also reminds me of a story in Might Magazine's collection Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp written by a guy who shows up for "work" in a large corporate office that he is not actually employed by, and waits to see who will notice that he doesn't work there. As you'd expect, for comedy's sake, no one notices and he goes around blending in for quite a while. Similar, but not the same as your idea.

19:45 / 19.02.04

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League.

21:06 / 19.02.04

Gene Wolfe's long story "Forlesen" also explores the same theme, although it's in the context of an entire life. Terribly sad story, and, come to think of it, very Kafka-esque.

21:14 / 19.02.04

[A] Might Magazine [story] written by a guy who shows up for "work" in a large corporate office that he is not actually employed by, and waits to see who will notice that he doesn't work there.

Also the premise of a New Yorker article of a few years ago; "My Fake Job," by Rodney Rothman. Of course, that turned out to be slightly fictional, too...

21:43 / 19.02.04

Stavros and Davros, my pitch for a sitcom in which the Harry Enfield character shares the flat above the kebab shop with the leader of the Daleks.

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

23:51 / 19.02.04

Is this thread solely for ideas about written pieces?

If not, the idea for your thread has already been done at the halfbakery, thus making it redundant.

Like.

04:19 / 20.02.04

I thought of this while counting sheep:

Irrational numbers are real numbers that (shocking!) cannot be represented by ratios, right?

So, that gives you your sqrt(2) and your e and your pi, but also numbers like .1101001000100001..., which is "1, then n zeroes, where n={0,1,2,...}". (I'll call that an 'algorithmic number' for the moment.)

So what I'm wondering is: surely there's a formula telling me what the kth number of the above is (there's a really weird one for the Fibonacci sequence IIRC), but there is no easy formula telling me the kth number of pi or sqrt(2) that I am aware of. So by some measure, it seems like there are different information densities of real numbers--I've given an entire description of the number above, but I can't give you a complete description of pi without writing out an infinite number of digits.* So I'm wondering if that's actually mathematically interesting, or just an observation that stops there.

* - come to think of it though, I can use pi without describing it, and I'm not sure I can do anything interesting with the above algorithmic number, so maybe pi is the less dense one in some sense.

09:14 / 20.02.04

Thanks for the replies, you lot, good stuff. I shall try and check some of them out. That Gene Wolfe story sounds particularly interesting.

Rizla:

"Actually I think your idea owes quite a lot to the reality of modern day employment. I have no idea what a lot of people do for a living even after they've explained it to me several times. And I'm sure I could actually do their jobs and still be none the wiser.."

That's it precisely. I have never been able to explain what I do at work, even to myself. "Uh, it's computery, officey stuff." And on a couple of occassions I've never been exactly sure who I was working for. But I do at least know what the company or institution I work for does or sells, and I've always had a good idea of what I would be doing on any given day. So I wondered if anyone had written about an extreme or absurdist version of this situation where even those were not known. Everyone except the main protagonist would have to be either 'in on it' (or act as if they are), or be unquestioning and confident of their part in it, however bizarre or illogical it is, right up to the end. And most importantly, the protagonist would have to be made to feel like an idiot for not knowing what to do or why they were doing it, despite never having had it exlained to them. And it would have to be f---ing depressing. A less Kafkaesque version would have the protagonist suss it all out (eg they'd be part of some sinister organisation doing something horrible).

Stevie Dubplate:

"Is this thread solely for ideas about written pieces?"

Nope, you can use it to discuss any sort of idea you like. Thinking about it, it doesn't even have to be something you thought of doing yourself, you might just want to know if such a thing exists or has happened.

"If not, the idea for your thread has already been done at the halfbakery, thus making it redundant."

Ooh, gimme a fishbone why don't you! Does the 'bakery thread actually perform the same function as this one, or is it just an idea for something like this (eg "I reckon there should be a sort of patent office where you can go to register your ideas and they can tell you if it's already been done or not")? Either way, I'd like to check it out, can you remember which section it was in?

10:09 / 20.02.04

someone is given a job, but they have no idea what it is, not even after they have been doing it for several months?

There's an episode of Black Books that does this, though it's not very Kafkaesque.

As for this thread not being very original - South Park did a similar thing, of course, in the episode Simpsons Did It.

10:50 / 20.02.04

Deva>

Black Books! That's the one I meant when I said "that episode of Spaced". Thanks, I was uncertain and it was annoying me.

12:38 / 20.02.04

Also the premise of a New Yorker article of a few years ago; "My Fake Job," by Rodney Rothman. Of course, that turned out to be slightly fictional, too...

Oops, my mistake. That's the article I was thinking of, but I had the wrong book in mind. It was republished in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002, also edited by D.Eggers (hence the confusion).

15:20 / 22.02.04

also on the drew carry show he had a new job for a dot-com company and the punchline was that he didn`t know what his job was. it`s been done even on sitcoms

19:15 / 22.02.04

Perfect Tommy: It depends on what you mean by "formula". For instance, if you allow yourself a computer program to calculate the digits, you can end up with lots of numbers - you can do e and pi, I think. But you always end up with countably many numbers and so leave out "most" reals.

Chaitin has said some interesting things about randomness and stuff. His number Omega is impossible to calculate - read a talk about it here - which is interesting.

22:44 / 22.02.04

There's a Bentley Little horror short-story called "The Pounding Room" which is along similar lines, which happens to be really good. Guy gets job he doesn't understand, bad stuff happens.