It's official--Icarus is over

Sometime around the late 80's, I was thinking: what if there was a virtual reality environment that people stayed in so long, they forgot all about the real world? And what if the story was told from within the virtual environment, where literally anything is possible, and the most outrageous miracles are accepted as natural? Until something happens that drives someone to discover the truth...leading up to the dramatic "wake-up" scene in the life-support coffin!

I let this story sit for years, fleshing out characters and setting whenever ideas occured to me. Then, in the late 90's, the Wachowski Brothers came along and STOLE my wake-up scene! And they added the whole element of the people being prisoners in virtual reality, which added a lot more action and exitement than I had imagined. They had taken my idea, and worse yet, done something great with it! (Sure they blew it in Matrix Revolutions, but that's neither here nor there.)

The smart thing to do would have been to let it go. Instead, I decided the time had come to tell the story of Icarus, despite the fact that virtual reality had become a common theme. Movies like The Matrix, The 13th Floor, and Vanilla Sky would make it nigh-impossible to keep my audience from guessing that it was all just virtual reality, but damn the torpedoes! Nobody has delved into the issues of consciousness and our relationship with our bodies that virtual reality raises--that can be what sets my story apart!

Well...I've enjoyed it, and gotten some good practice out if it, but even I have to acknowledge that I haven't touched it in six months. The time has come to officially hang it up. I really, really hate to leave any project unfinished, but at this rate it's going to take me ten years to finish, and I just can't afford the time and energy it requires.

Plus, in the scant 6 episodes I managed to create, I couldn't stay fixed on any direction. Just about the time I finished episode 1, I became enamored with the European varieties of sci-fi that feed the very fabric of reality into the speculative mill, and offer no explanation for the wondrous spectacles that result. (So much more enjoyable that the crew of the Enterprise endlessly re-routing power from the dilithium crystals to the forward bimblethruster to make a temporary particle-engorger! Aaarrgghh!) I felt Icarus 1 worked great as a pure reality-bender. I was tempted to abandon the virtual reality idea--which may have been the best way to keep the story relevant for a post-Matrix audience--but no, I mulishly stuck to my original story in all its deflated glory. Too bad. After episode 6, I thought about wrapping the whole thing up with one final episode, going back to the reality-bender theme. But Episode 6 is where we finally get concrete clues that it is virtual reality! Sigh. In the intervening episodes I got fixated on action, which I do in a somewhat outdated style, instead of my lofty setting-apart themes of consciousness. Not to mention it was taking me months to complete a meager 8-10 pages. The readers I heard from seemed to enjoy it, but I felt a certain pressure to crank the episodes out faster, or at a quality that was worth the wait. Well, I couldn't quite do either one, or settle on what kind of story it really was. So I think it's best to focus on other things for now.

For anyone who's dying to know how it was all going to turn out, send me an email and I'll tell you all about it. (For anyone who'se read The Rogues of GranBreca, it's essentially the same story, with arguably the same characters.)

Maybe I'll pick it up again someday (I'm thinking it might work better as an animated film--an even MORE labor-intensive format). More likely, elements of the story and setting will show up in other projects down the road. Thanks to everyone who read it, and my apologies for leaving you hanging. I would like to think that in its unfinished state, Icarus can resonate as a virtual reality story, a nanotech world, a mysterious alternate reality, or whatever kind of story the imaginative reader wants it to be.

Neal Skorpen

2-11-04